eSignal fast market hang ups.

[radly212]

During fast markets I continue to be frustrated with eSignal hanging up. My trading platform dome keeps up just fine and I have another program that charts and it keeps up as well. My computer is fast and I have plenty of RAM memory. Does anyone have a solution? Would a faster graphics card help?

[RuGO]

It may sound silly, but I have two nVidia 8800 GTS in my system, 4G ram and a super fast processor... and with all that, it doesn't make a bit of difference. Slimmed down on the number of scripts (although on a quad monitor setup, I am not sure how much one could trim before defeating the purpose) and it made some difference, but the hangups are still evident.

The diagnostic tool finds no errors and the system runs no other apps... All eSignal can do is promise us the next version. Wonder for how long some of you have heard this 'tune'? In the meantime, try to get some help on getting your system integrated with the broker and see how long it will take them to call you back (Brent and Bob)... I'm still waiting!

[pmurraymc]

I get the same problem and it has been going on for ages, all you have to do is wait for some important US news to see the problem, but they tell me and any other poster everything is fine at eSignal central, or wait for the server and/or software upgrade.

Have plenty of friends who do not get problems - but they do not use eSignal, I wonder if eSignals corporate clients get these problems.

Paul.

[RL7836]

Don't know if you guys are the same posters but there is a thread (or more than 1) on this topic on Elite Trader. Seems there are a number of very frustrated eSig users.....

[radly212]

Thanks all

OK, well it appears to me that what we have here is an issue with the eSignal program itself. I run another program with heavy graphics using the eSignal data feed and it just hums along during fast markets while eSignal hangs. Despite what tech support says it does not appear to be an issue with “my computer” after all. I hope they fix this in the very near future. I like eSignal, but this is enough to make you think of looking into other providers. Thank you all for your feedback.

[RL7836]

While 'knock on wood', I'm not having issues right now, this capacity issue is what caused me to move from Q-charts to eSig (before eSig purchased them). The techs at Q-charts swore the problem was my computer. To alleviate any possibility of that being the case, I purchased a $5k+ workstation w/ **huge** capacity. After that, they admitted they were having problems....

From the techno-geeks on Elite Trader, it appears that one of the issues is a design flaw in the basic software architecture - something about being 'single-threaded' .... A few months back one of the eSig techs told me that eSig software cannot use both of my processors - so that seems to support the geeks theory ....

Good luck w/ your issues. I'm not going anywhere unless I start having problems or another viable solution appears ....

[demarcog]

Try using short term time templates.

The only time this has ever happend to me is when I'm doing backtesting using a 120 time template with 1- 5 minute data intervals and then when trading starts forget to change it back to a 1-3 day template. It's a guaranteed performance issue, sometimes requiring terminating eSignal.

Having said that, I've been using eSignal eveyday for over 3 years trading with both a copporate and individual account. It is the most reliable and efficient charting package and data feed out there. In that time I never experienced an outage or performance problem using short term time templates.

Many times people on the desk with other charting packages would have problems and the execution systems I use would occasionally hang and eSignals prices would continue updating in a timely manner.

In addition, anyone who has a dual processing CPU can bring up a Windows Task Manager-Performance Monitor and see that it does actually use two processors, so it appears there is type of multi-threading going

Even if it were strictly single-threaded, having a dual processor would free the other processor for any other work run on the PC, such as the Data Manager.

To use more then one CPU, programs have to be completely redisigned and reprogrammed using compilers that create seperatly executable "pieces" or threads from the origional single-threaded version. Not all programs can necessarily utilize two CPU simultaneously and dong so in a precisely performance balanced fashion is almost impossible.

It would be great if eSignal was multi-threaded and you could termintate one chart, or a backtest without killing the entire application and even more efficiently use all the available processors, but the fact that it does not doesn't necassarily mean it's flawed.

Glen