Performance issues yesterday and today..

[Lisa23]

I will run Ping Plotter. What address do I trace?

I am going to skip changing the program as that has never made a difference in the past.

I was told when I downloaded 8.0 I had to manually delete two files or they would not be removed by Windows and then the program would not truly install.

[Lisa23]

I am pinging CM*.esignal.Com. I show under 50ms at the destination. Some intermittant packet loss at various points, but I would not think that would explain lags of several seconds.

[Lisa23]

So does that tell you anything? What more can I do? I received an email with about 7 different server addresses, but since I can't pick which server I connect to, I'm not sure that is going to tell us anything. Please respond, this is the week for me to decide whether to cancel Esignal or not.

[ScottJ]

50 ms wouldn't cause a noticeable delay but we need to see the reports. Please email or send via PM if you'd prefer (not sure the system will allow it via PM though).

Did you experience delays this week so far? If so, how did the report look at the time you were seeing delays?

Thanks.

[demarcog]

Although over the past month or so I have seen major improvements particularily when installing the latest candidate releases. There are times of the day when the market is busy, especially around news events that eSignal experiences significant delays.

These occurred yesterday and today around 10 am that essentially caused eSignal to hang for several minutes, requiring a restart. Having positions and not knowing where the market is trading for many seconds and minutes at a time is an obvious nightmare for short term traders.

As I mentioned many times before I've been using eSignal everyday for 5 years or so, love the product, believe it's the best on the market and have not altered my setup significantly over that course of time.

I've reduced my open charts to 6 or less and only monitior 30-40 symbols and still experiencing problems.

Again, the situation is improving significantly and I'm committed to patiently waiting for a final resolution. However these delays are IMHO very real and usually costly.

Lisa23 is not the only person experiencing the issue, but may be one of the few who haven't given up on reporting them as some of us have and for that I thank you.

Glen

[ScottJ]

Hi Glen,

Great to hear the latest version is working well for you and we appreciate your continued loyalty. Yes, some users are still reporting sporadic delays. The difference between those reports and the ones in March is that back in March, we had network issues that were causing delays. Those have all been resolved so now it's a matter of continuing to make the application more efficient and working with individual users to figure out why they are seeing delays.

One thing that will really help is a tool we're building to help isolate the source of delays from the user's desktop perspective. I think we're still a few months away from having it available but once ready, it should help us take a major step towards erasing the mystery of why a user sees delays.

Thanks.

[Lisa23]

I don't know if you received the ping report.

I tried pinging the 4 servers I was sent by email.

208.185.29.104 NYC - 100-110 rt
63.251.38.115 good (70-80ms) dallas
65.216.76.34 good (70-80ms) chicago
206.65.181.39 San Jose - over 110-120 round trip.

Obviously, the shorter trips are best. San Jose is the worst. I am in the Seattle area.

However, without being able to tell what server I'm connected to, I'm not sure this information helps, other than to say Esignal needs more servers in San Jose and NYC.


What else do you need to know? Once I am experiencing delays I cannot always close out and restart to try and get another server, I just don't think that is a reasonable alternative.

[Lisa23]

Oh, and the trace times jump once I reach NYC or San Jose based on the server list, before that the times are low.

[Dave180]

Lisa

However, without being able to tell what server I'm connected to

Have you tried using netstat (a command line prog with Windows, but no doubt others available)?
You will see a list of addresses (well, names), the eSig ones are obvious. But to tracert them you need to use the physical IP, not name, as they don't resolve, either spot the mapping in the name or run netstat -n.

Good luck

And I also heard of delays Thursday.

[ScottJ]

Lisa,

Were you seeing delays while running any of those pingplotter reports in the background? If you were, yet the reports indicate hop times totalling in just the 100 ms range, it's likely not an ISP or routing issue.

If that's the case, that points further towards the desktop somewhere. Really makes sense to try the latest 10.1 release candidate ( we go Gold today I believe ) and see how that performs.

Thanks.

[Lisa23]

Hey thanks Dave!

Scott, I don't think I had delays when running the ping plotter, but the problem is I will only notice delay when I am trying to enter or manage a trade. At that point, I obviously don't have time to start up ping plotter.

I did have delays on Friday, pretty significantly (20s or so), and I closed and restarted, so likely got on a better server, as I did not have any more delays that I noticed.

I am still wondering why 10.1 would be better than 8.0. I don't need the bells and whistles, and I don't want anything that uses more processor speed. I was told by your tech dept. that 8.0 was much less of a processor hog and if I did not need the bells and whistles I should stick with that.

Further, I was not having the problems in Dec - Feb and then suddenly, along with everyone else, had a lot of problems in March. I don't see how my local computer has anything to do with it.

I am going to figure out how to know which server I am attached to for the next two days of trading to see if I can know when I connect whether I should get out and get a different server. Otherwise I will have to make other arrangements.

[Lisa23]

Well, figuring out my server is more technical than I have time for.

I had another charting platform up today alongside Esignal and IB. Esignal was lagging (a lot). The other two were in synch.

[ScottJ]

Hey Lisa,

I was hoping that the value of ping plotter was the ability to have it run in the background so when/if you see a delay, you've captured the bandwidth performance before, during and after noticeable delays.

It continues to look like a desktop issue so aside from troubleshooting each component of your PC, the best suggestion is to load 10.1 and test it out. Our app had grown inefficient in several ways so we spent much of the last few months making the eSignal application lighter and leaner. More improvements will come in 10.2 as well.

Thanks.

[Lisa23]

Unless I know which server I am attached to the ping plotter data is not necessarily useful.

How can it be a desk top issue if Ib and other charting platforms are not lagging? I don't see how, and I am tired of Esignal blaming my "desk top." This has been going on long enough, all the way back to the first time I called and was told I was the only one having problems.

What "components" of the PC would you troubleshoot? Come on, let's get real.

I've asked several times if 10.2 uses less processing power than the old 8.0 which your tech person told me to load. If not, it won't make any difference.

You've said I don't delete specific files to load another program, but your tech dept. differs. Not helpful. No push for the program, so I have to go look for it. Then I have to isolate my pages so they are not overwritten, which you also don't mention.

[ScottJ]

I suppose I understand your skepticism but we deal with hundreds of issues every month and have seen plenty of examples where something specific was causing freezing or delays. Here's one example from a user who teaches using the eSignal platform to dozens of students each month:

My technical people performed a series of performance tests on all the computers.

The benchmark tests for 2D rendering on NVidia 7900 and 7950GT cards was 1000….and those computers don’t lag on esignal.

The benchmark for the computer I use, which is state of the art, uses two 8800GTX Nvida cards. They tested at a stunning 400, 60% lower than the other computers.

The refresh rate on the video is now in SERIOUS question. We’ve ordered the cards and will replace the 8800GTX cards soon.

Follow-up a few weeks later:

We installed 10,000 rpm Raptors in all the computers and we have not had a problem with eSignal freezing since

It is now the FIRST thing we check with students and we make sure they have Diskeeper software for defrag

As I hope you can imagine, it's no easy to task to diagnose that a brand new PC would be loaded with an inferior video card but it happens.

All this said, we realize that some programs run better than eSignal, even with possible hardware issues. That's why we've been working to improve how eSignal requests data, how it paints the screen, how it calculates formulas, etc. 10.1 is the start with more to come in 10.2. 10.1 is available on our download page.

Does 10.1 use less processing power? Yes, it should.

You don't need to delete any files to install 10.1. Whatever information you were given previous is inaccurate and I apologize for the confusion. The installer does not overwrite custom user-defined windows or settings. If you feel more comfortable backing-up your files, I certainly understand. Type in 1530 in our KB search engine and you'll get an article on file types and names.

Thanks.