esignal 10 has severe memory/cpu issues

[chimanshu]

I have a 50+ charts open up at a time with atleast 15 TimeSales. I have a quad core with 2 gig of memory. esignal 8 was ok but after i upgraded to esignal 10, the meomory usitilization quickly goes up to 1+gig for winsig.exe and then i get 'out of memory' error from esignal. I then need to kill and restart. This is happening almost every day. On a normal trading days this 'out of memory' takes 5 to 6 hours to happen (almost US trading session, so i still feel ok). but on saturday/Sunday if i try to load up that same page, i takes 10 to 15 minutes to become 'out of memory' . cpu utilization is almost 60+ %. Never faced such bad software in last 5 years of my esginal usage.

Thanks
Himanshu

[demarcog]

Re: esignal 10 has severe memory/cpu issues

Originally posted by chimanshu
I have a 50+ charts open up at a time with atleast 15 TimeSales. I have a quad core with 2 gig of memory. esignal 8 was ok but after i upgraded to esignal 10, the meomory usitilization quickly goes up to 1+gig for winsig.exe and then i get 'out of memory' error from esignal. I then need to kill and restart. This is happening almost every day. On a normal trading days this 'out of memory' takes 5 to 6 hours to happen (almost US trading session, so i still feel ok). but on saturday/Sunday if i try to load up that same page, i takes 10 to 15 minutes to become 'out of memory' . cpu utilization is almost 60+ %. Never faced such bad software in last 5 years of my esginal usage.

Thanks
Himanshu

Himanshu,

There is a free program called Process Explorer offerred by Microsoft that give more extensive memory and CPU itilization that you may find helpful, here is the link:

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/Utilities/ProcessExplorer.mspx.

What version of windows are you running and what are the Vitrual Memory settings?

What are the stack and heap setting in TOOLS-EFS-Settings?

Keep in mind that usually "out of memory" errors refer to virtual memory, not physical memory although it is possible that this error occurs due to physical memory shortages.

Several easy changes can be made that may resolve the problem:

Increasing the windows swap file size

Increasing the eSignal heap and stack size available in the TOOLS -EFS Settings

Other more difficult solution are available: running 64bit versions of XP where the virtual memory size is increased significantly.



50 charts with the time and sale depending on the studies, time intervals, and amount of data is a fairly significant amount fo processing.

The addtional functionality of Version 10 required additional code be resident, greater processing requirements, and additional memory. Although it always possible there is a memory management bug, it is also possible that what you are seeing is a refection of the additional requirements.

You may want to download the Process Explorer and increase the swap and esignal memory settings and see if that resolves your problem.

Hope it helps.


Glen

[alrados]

Glen,

Can you please elaborate a bit more about EFS "heap and stack" sizes?

This is the first I've heard of them.

What do they do?

How much can we increase them by? Is there a knock-on effect that might slow other parts of eSignal if we bump them up?

Cheers.

[zottl]

chimanshu, you are not alone! I've the same problems like you. Loading of my initial page takes 2 or 3 minutes with 100% cpu utilization. The question is what eSignal is doing against these problems??

[demarcog]

Originally posted by alrados
Glen,

Can you please elaborate a bit more about EFS "heap and stack" sizes?

This is the first I've heard of them.

What do they do?

How much can we increase them by? Is there a knock-on effect that might slow other parts of eSignal if we bump them up?

Cheers.

Hi Alrados,

I have not seen any documentation other then a few forum posts and all I know for certain is they are modifiable parameters see: TOOLS-EFS-SETTINGS. Increasing the values did resolve some out of memory problems I was receiveing a few releases back.


It takes a few seconds and can easily be changed back to the original settings and thought it was worth a try.


Other then that I wish I could offer more information on the settings.

Glen

[Dave180]

Hi
I was told that as I have an AMD dual core I shouldn't expect eSignal to work, see KB article 2532, I'm told no support available.
As you (Himanshu) mention a quad you have been using for a while you possibly don't have an AMD, so that excuse may no longer wash.

The symptoms I get, with 10, and all the releases up to now (r3, Oct31) are that right click chart menu items tend to disappear (also mentioned on other posts) and then I get a crash, sometimes I get the eSignal crash reporter thing, sometimes not. I don't get any error message as such. Oddly, if I, say, close a few IE windows and then right click the menu can sometimes show some of the missing items. There is definitely some kind of resource issue here, but not pure memory (a reduction of a few points of a GB around the 1.3 mark, way below that available was seen when IE windows were closed).

I don't have 50 charts, but I do have a fair amount of EFS running (with multiple time frames, so that may count).
I have 4GB (although XP only gives me 3 and a bit I understand), and memory never seems to be excessively used as seen from the task manager.

The problems can happen quite soon after I load eSIgnal, if there has already been a crash. Beats me how there is any "echo" of it left in the PC, thought processes couldn't interfere with each other?

I also note that a copy of Genesis Navigator will throw up proper "out of memory" error messages after eSignal has been running. Again, memory is not obviously short, but at least it has a polite message.

I wonder if perhaps it is video (GDI) memory that is short or something similar, not just "ordinary" memory.
Whatever it is, when I had eSig 8 and Win2K it used to run like a dream. Unfortunately I happened to move to a new PC when I upgraded eSignal, so can't be certain about the causes of all of this. But I've not noticed any systematic problems with the PC when I'm not using eSignal and with eSignal simply saying "your problem - don't use AMD dual core as we won't support you" I'm not happy.

And as for dates and times etc not working properly when you select "Exchange time", unbelievable, and not even fixed for r3.

And I also have problems with downloading historic tick data for volume charts - and if only it would cache it across sessions and save me some bandwidth and maybe even then give historic bid and ask data!

[demarcog]

I also experience crash on v10 when right clicking in chart.

Dave180,

I'm running an intel based laptop and several times a day when right clicking in a chart do not see the Remove and Reload options and eSignal crashed soon there after.

In addition many times I also need to reboot.

I also when right clicking either I don't see the Formula listed or a blank square appears instead of the list of formula directories and eSignal crashes soon there after.

Does anyone know if those crash reports are monitored by tech support?

Was also wondering if it's recommended that problems such as this, eSignal errors not related to any forum topic should be directed to someone at tech support or do they monitor the forum for errors.

Thanks

Glen

[croy1962]

I have similar issues.

I have about a dozen custom EFS that never had a glitch on ver 7.x nor 8.x. In fact they have been so stable we have been avoiding to modify them in the past few years to make sure we would not jeopardize the stability.

I typically run about 15-20 charts on YM and DJ and a few market indicator like the tick trin etc.... In total there is never more than 7 ticker beeing monitored by the Data Manager.

From a fresh session starting a clean Data Manager, I run into memory errors after a few hours of trading. (something that never showed on ver 7.x or 8.x)...

A fair amount (>40 traders) are using the same EFS on various configuration of Windows XP ranging from pentium IV to quad processors and Extreme Quads. The smalest memory config is 1Gb and the largest is 4Gb. All have this memory leak issue. The only variable is how long it takes to crash rather than if it will crash. Crashes occurs within 15 mins for the worst case with a low memory config to 2 hours on a quad with 4 Gb of RAM.

All the above computers have been updated for esignal 10.x from prior version. When we did we felt that it might be an update issue where the update might have left and old DLL with a new incompatible version of the main software. We ran a few computer with a fresh patches and up to date version of XP with a clean install of esignal v10. Same issues !

We have played with the heap and stacks params in the FES menu and from the original config an increase in values would only crash the computer faster.

To restart e-signal we need to close down and either re-boot or some of the users have a memory clean up like CacheMan XP to recup the lost blocks.

Increasing swap memory or cache memory on XP did nothing good other than slow down the speed of the computer forcing a swaping of pages in and out of physical memory onto the disk. And the system would still crash within a few hours of the clean start.

If we start e-signal while heavy market activity is underway, we usually crash before we get the first few charts to show up completely....

I looked all over for notices that ver 10 had chages in the undelying java engine to potentially rework some of the EFS but this message thread leads me to think that this might not be EFS related but rather a core memory leak either in the graphic engine or the interface with the Data Manager.

This is typical of a memory leak problem ... In fact when I looked at the memory analysis CacheMan XP does, it does clean up and free some rogue lost memory blocks. The memory pool simply gets depleated and then when the esignal application goes into a memory error, the charts gets completely messed up.

Considering the variety of computer beeing tested and the longevity of these EFS. Considering that many people from various walk of trading using different EFS are facing the same issue. It seems pretty obvious to me that esignal 10 does have a serious memory management problem.

At this end we are unfortunately considering rolling back to a prior version of esignal .... but that is something hard to do and it hardly seems logical.

Hopefully this flood of info will help the eisgnal Quality Control dept to focus the energies at the right places.


thanks
Claude

[eSignal_JasonK]

Hello Claude,

Thank you for your detailed report. Your observations are accurate and we are aware that version 10.0.1086 has some problems with memory management. One of the top priorities for our next release, which is currently in beta, specifically addresses memory usage. If possible, it would be very helpful to us if you could try our current beta version on one of your machines to see if you still encounter the problems you've described. Please see this thread, External Beta Testing for 10.1, in the eSignal Beta Testing forum for a list of items for the 10.1.1184 beta version. You will also find the download link in this thread. If you choose to do so, please feel free to report any other issues you encounter while using the beta version.

There is some helpful instructions for reverting back to a previous version as well if you choose to go back to version 8.0 for the time being.

[SteveH]

Jason,

Is there any particular reason that you're recommending the downgrade to 80r1 instead of 80r2?

I'm running 8.0 Build 782 which I think is the 80r2.

Thanks for the clarification,

Steve

[croy1962]

Thanks for the reply Jason....

We have elected to install the Beta on a few machines to see how it fly.

I strongly beleive it is more productive to help debug the new version than to simply revert to V8 ....

I will keep you posted on other problems if any

Thanks again
Claude