Winsig.exe CPU Usage 60 %

[brianb]

Bügeleisen,

I have followed this discussion and others regarding high cpu % when running eSignal and other apps with multimonitors. I have limited knowledge about the way data is handled internally by computers and greatly appreciate when someone like Steve Hare or Garth explain the details.
My personal experience seems to indicate that your bottleneck and mine are more I/O related than cpu or RAM bound. Over the years my systems have grown faster and more complex. Currently I run 6 monitors off 3 video cards. Adding the 3rd video card really slowed things down for me as did stretching an application across 3 video cards. I find it interesting and consider it a big clue that when eSignal is running but minimized to offscreen the winsig.exe cpu% drops noticeably. This is also the case although much less so when running Ensign across three video cards. Programs that are only run on 1 display or both outputs of the main (AGP) card don't seem to cause as high a cpu spike when changing symbols as they do when stretched multimonitor fashion.
For those of us who want to run 6,8 or 10 monitors what would a good solution be? Assuming we are willing to build new boxes from the ground up what is the best way to get all the monitors on the same/fastest bus? If I understand the new mobo's they only have 1 slot for the new pci-express slot for video. I've seen very few video cards that can support 4 dvi outputs at 1600x1200 resolution. I can find no information either way that running the high resolutions that I do increases the demands placed on a system but I believe it does. FWIW my current trading box is a 2.8Ghz/865 chipset 800FSB/ 1 GB 400DDR and ATI 9800/9200/7500 cards.
The idea of assigning an application to a dedicated cpu appeals to me so I'm thinking a dual AMD box will be in my future but I and I assume many others really need help with the multimonitor issue.

One additional suggestion, along the lines that brianb discussed, take a look at the relative data transfer rates on the motherboard picture in an earlier post. For those with multiple monitors, it appears to me that it would be appropriate to identify the most resource intensive charts, then move those charts to the monitors that are serviced by the AGP port (or the fastest graphic card). Then for future reference, mark the monitors in such a way that you will know which ones are associated with the "faster" card. That will allow you to easily identify which monitors to use for those resource intensive charts. This seems to me that it would probably give the biggest bang for the buck with regards to improved performance.

[atlas]

BrianB,

I am in the same boat as you. I am running 6 1600x1200 panels. Esignal runs fine on the AGP outputs (fast Nvidia 5700 ultra). But there are problems on the PCI outputs (Colorgraphic Quad). I am at a loss as to what to do. All I really know, is that the charts almost crawl on the Xentera. What is the answer? Is it the slow Ati 9000 it is based on, or is it the PCI bandwidth, or both? I really don't care the expense of the solution, I just want one that handles fast markets. I am currently eyeing this http://www.gamepc.com/labs/view_cont...okie%5Ftest=1. Dual PCI Express lanes on a dual proc. I could use Colorgraphic's new PCI-E Xenteras. Trouble is, I don't even know if this would suffice. Is a quad processor, necessary?

Chris

Hi Bob,

Sorry I did not get back with you right away, I am kind of surprised, based on your configuration, that you are having problems in fast markets.

As you indicated, perhaps an upgrade would help, but before I would do that, I would recommend trying to figure out which application / efs is giving you performance problems. I would look at anything that is providing any output, be it to a file, a symbol or line to a chart, or to the formula output window.

After that, I would try and run some of the utilities available on the internet to evaluate your computer speed. The one that I am familiar with is PC Pitstop at www.pcpitstop.com. This could identify some shortcomings in your system. ( I just tried to run some tests and was not successful, perhaps it is my firewall)

Another killer of performance is the Registry. As you download different applications the Windows Registry is modified. Even when you uninstall them, oftentimes the Registry is not cleaned effectively. I would recommend checking your registry as well.


If you are going for a hardware upgrade, I would start by keeping your current equipment and consider upgrading the Motherboard. System throughput is greatly affected by the components. (perhaps before that, find a forum associated with the motherboard manufacturer and ask some questions regarding improving system performance with bios modifications, e.g. bios flash updates). I would recommend getting a fairly new Motherboard from ASUS or ABIT (there are others as well) that has high quality components, lots of throughput and can be overclocked easily. (I think there are MSI motherboards that has automatic overclocking that only overclocks when you need it).

Lastly, I would also consider a graphics card upgrade.

edit - take a look at www.pcstats.com and look at the articles on upgrading and other reviews

I hope this is of some help.

Regards,

[Bob A.]

Hi Steve,
Many thanks for your thoughts. I've looked at the pcpitstop site and it seems like a good place to start. Also, I'll get back to running the efs monitor to see if that identifies any culprits.

Re upgrading my motherboard and graphics card, I'm not clear how much upgrade potential exists vs a year ago when I bought this system. I have the MSI 875P Neo-FIS2R motherboard (3.0 Ghz HT) and the Appian Rushmore PCI 64MB DDR Quad DVI graphics card. Any thoughts on upgradeability potential?

By comparison re motherboard/processors, I've been looking at the TYAN Thunder i7525 with dual 3.2 Ghz XEONs but wondering if I might get better performance out of an AMD Opteron-based system namely the new TYAN Thunder K8WE nForce4 Pro 2200 motherboard.

Best regards,
Bob

Hi Bob,

Regarding your Motherboard, you are correct, most definitely top end.

http://gruntville.com/reviews/mohter...pneo/page6.php

I noticed your motherboard has dynamic overclocking, do you have it turned on? perhaps a bios update may help as well.

Your video card is PCI based. As discussed earlier in this thread, that could be the source of your problem. Perhaps the addition of an AGP video card would help to eliminate any throughput bottlenecks on the motherboard.

Just a point of reference, when testing a machine with an AGP NVIDIA graphics card using PC Pitstop, these were the results:



Interestingly, even though I have two monitors hooked to this card, only one of them showed up on the test results. I am not sure the implication of that relative to the video card test and video throughput on the motherboard .

Regarding the AMD machines, they may have the greatest potential for performance improvement, although I have seen a thread where a someone is having some performance issues with one. I am not sure motherboards supporting multiple Intel processors will get you the necessary performance improvements based on the single threaded nature of the eSignal application.

Hi Bob,

First, I looked at the Tyan Mobo's, specifically, the AMD based unit. The reviews I saw were very impressive. Before going there though, you should look at some of the more recent tests on the dual athalon mobo's, the 939's with the new 90nm process which will translate into less heat and better performance.
edit - dual processors, which way to go?
http://forums.pcper.com/showthread.php?t=3801
http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=122


Another suggestion is that you may want to download your latest drivers for your video card(s). After looking at my performance numbers on my video card below and comparing with others on the PC pitstop site, I found that the same video card on similar machines were much faster. I am downloaded the most recent video drivers and realised a small ~ 2% performance gain in video card speed.

Finally here is a simple solution you may want to consider. If not there already, try using 16 bit video resolution and revert back to the classic windows theme. This had been recommended to me in the past and I had implemented on my other machine. When I implemented these changes on this machine, the measured performance on the video card improved by 50% to 270 MP/s

Regards,

[atlas]

Steve you are right about the 16-bit hack. I don't know whether it was this or going all Nvidia (adding several NVS 280 dual DVI cards), but my cpu usage seems much more manageable now. Thought about even going to 8-bit, but then I can't get a gray background on the charts.

[Bob A.]

Hi Steve,

As usual you respond way above and beyond the call. Many thanks. There's certainly lots of things to do before giving up on my existing system so I'll plunge ahead on your many suggestions.

If I do end up having to move to a Dual CPU system, I think there's a chance that Intel's Xeons could work for me. As I mentioned before, I'm running two additional charting applications that use the Data Manager (MarketDelta and TradeMaven) and with them running the load seems well balanced under HT, at least according to the Task Manager windows. Anyway, I'm not at that stage yet.

Cheers,
Bob

[neoikon]

I've been struggling with this for awhile too. It seems when viewing the chart is most important (high volume times) eSignal freezes on me, sometimes for 30+ seconds! This is unacceptable when you're day trading and have to make quick decisions!

I think everything in this discussion is correct. One solution is to throw more hardware at it (CPU, vid cards, etc).

Another solution people have mentioned is to uninstall and re-install esignal. The problem with this is that people (including myself) would still use old charts (ACH files) with the new install. Thus the problem doesn't go away.

So, that being said, a solution that helped me is to right-click on a chart, go to "Line Tools", then "Line List". From that window click "All Symbols", sort by "Last modified" (may have to expand that column a bit), and delete everything that's older than today (or this week). Do this for each chart you have. Also, have it alert you when there are too many lines or they are older than some date.

The less lines the chart has to handle the better the performance. Apparently even if the line or symbol is not displayed on the screen, it can effect performance of that chart. So, yes, more hardware can help the problem too... or give your existing hardware less to deal with!

Hope this helps!

Daniel

[Musashi]

I had a similar problem.

It turned out it was the multiple EFS's I was running per chart. So Once I coded these into 1 or 2 EFS's everything was fine.