Bad E-mini Feed today

[mr.marcus]

...yep......6 very unhappy traders here in the uk...given up on support long time ago...2 traders have already quit esignal...we dont even bother contacting support any more....unless were bored and wonder what the weather is like the other side of the globe its really a waste of time.
some days you cant get second charts...sometimes no volume....and days like to day just finish it off for me.....we have some bad companies here in the uk.....but even by there standards esignal are becomimg "piss takers".upping the price and lowering the already very low standard....yeah nice one

[Genx]

Some suggestions

1) LivePerson help is no help. Staff it with knowledgable people who have network status monitoring software available at their stations.
2) Have a toll-free help number if #1 is not possible and have those persons capable.
3) Post regular updates on causes/fixes. As of 8pm EST there is no update.


The data issue Friday was due to datacenter outtage. However, datacenters should have heat and water sensors with alarms for notification. Server equiptment is elevated off the floor in racks, but it is still good to know if there's a flood in the room.

A virtual IP subnet would bridge different networks and auto-reroute data requests on a section failure. Each separate locale must be able to handle a full load of traffic, otherwise the failover will overload it and the failover itself will fail (so no point in it at all). Testing by generating artificial traffic during scheduled maintenance times should be routine.

If there is an inability to handle fast markets when there is a lot of traffic, then the infrastructure is insufficient and has to be upgraded.

Threads in trader forums are poppng up like mushrooms over this...

[Trader273]

I was cleaning out some old email and came across the email where they said they are going to raise prices. The following line caught my attention:

"...We made the difficult decision to charge the administrative fee so as to continue providing fast, reliable, ever-increasing volumes of data and superior customer service. It covers costs for billing, collecting, reporting and remitting the futures exchanges' fees."

Well since they didn't provide fast, reliable data, or customer service. They actually provided slow (20-30 ticks behind the current price), unreliable (understatement), and no customer service (9pm EST and still no update??). It would make sense that we should not be charged and actually refunded. I know that will not happen, but it's just something to think about. They better get there act together or a whole bunch of people are going to leave.


-Nick

[Genx]

Delay to 12/14/05

I'm still seeing a delay of a few seconds with the quotes on the DOM of my broker screen. It varies from 1 to several seconds.

[opm8]

Re: Delay to 12/14/05

Yep. Looks like nothing's changed. If we get a volume spike, expect more of what we had yesterday.

WHAT'S GOING ON ESIGNAL???

Originally posted by Genx
I'm still seeing a delay of a few seconds with the quotes on the DOM of my broker screen. It varies from 1 to several seconds.

[brianb]

Same here. What the hell is going on esignal?

[JayF]

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[Genx]

Quandary...

The delay issue this morning may have been more limited in scope than the Fed announcement problem yesterday, which is good from a purely statistical perspective...

However, if you are affected by it, you have a 100% unusablility problem.

Now I am uncertain of whether or not I can trust what I see. The volume this morning could not have been as much as 2:15 yesterday, but the lag was there anyway. This appears to mean that it can occur anytime under any situation - even non-traffic-intense ones, leaving you constantly second-guessing. How can one real-time trade using delayed data without making potentially disasterous decisions?

It is not a good situation to be in.

[Genx]

"Extremely confident"

I am not sure what this means. After a follow-up response that another problem was addressed after complaints about delays yesterday, there appears to be no QOS checking going on - only reactive response rather than proactive measures.

Does "extremely confident" mean making someone whole after a bad decision made from bad data? Does it mean rebating a month's fee?

How much confidence does "extremely confident" translate into?

[buhrmaster]

I read elsewhere that ESignal is making a small rebate to its customers due to the severe data mishap on FOMC day. Is this being applied automatically or is there a rebate process?

Also is there a similar rebate for the outage I think last week in which servers went down and I (and many others) were not able to log in during trading hours?

Thank you.

[JayF]

QoS, or Quality of Service, testing is certainly being done on a frequent basis. For those that aren't aware of this term, QoS refers to a guarentee of a certain amount of throughput (i.e. how much data can be processed in a given amount of time.) As Scott mentioned in his letter (posted in the link I mentioned below,) we had already identified the upcoming need for more powerful servers. What we didn't anticipate is how soon we would need them.

It's hard to comment on your other point without posting raw test values, which is not something we can disclose. Generally speaking though, extremely confident means exactly that. We feel very strongly that these new servers can handle the future load spikes even beyond recent values.

[Genx]

Thank you

I respect the expertise being put in to remedy this problem. Having dealt in similar situations myself, I realize that it is not always the tech support that is the issue. Executives and "bean-counters" factor into the equation when providing service, and there is sometimes no shortage of short-sightedness.

However, the bottom line is the following question: Would you (personally) pay for services not rendered?

That is the crux of the issue. Backing up a promise of good service with a quantifiable dollar-amount would instill faith.

This is only a suggestion.


BTW - your efs coder support are extremely knowledgable and fast in response.