Connecting NinjaTrader to eSignal on another computer

[neotrader99]

Hi!

I have been running NinjaTrader with multiple simultaneous strategies to trade Futures contracts. ESignal is the primary real-time market data feed. These applications were installed on a higher end Dell PowerEdge 2950 server using Windows2003 Server Enterprise, and is co-located at a decent hosting facility in New York City. When live market volumes are above about 1000 contracts per minute, a dramatic slow-down of the Volume based charts is observed for the given Futures instrument (20Vol and 40 Vol representations). Typically the chart will just "stop" for between 10 to 20 seconds, then "burp" out a bunch of bars to catch up to real-time. We setup a similar system in parallel using another market feed instead of eSignal, but observed the same behavior (at the same time on the two parallel systems). Based on these observations, it is believed that when the market has larger volumes the ESignal Manager simply can't keep up to the incoming market tick data, while running NinjaTrader and the order fulfillment software; all in the Windows environment.

QUESTION: Is it possible to offload eSignal onto a separate Windows based server computer connected via a LAN to the server running NinjaTrader? If so, how would that be accomplished?

:-)

[eSignal_AveryH]

Hello neotrader99,

Thank you for the inquiry. It is not possible to run Ninja Trader on one machine and have it connect to the eSignal Data Manager running on another machine. All the applications must reside on the same physical machine.

You indicated that you saw the same "burp" effect in Ninja Trader when you used another data provider (non-eSignal data). This sounds as if it may be an issue with Ninja Trader's ability to process this level of data flow, but that is not conclusive without further testing.

You might want to observe the behavior of Ninja Trader connected to this non-eSignal data provider, and the eSignal application running at the same time (different systems) to see if the eSignal application also "burps" when the high volumes occur. If it doesn't, then that points more too a Ninja Trader issue than to the data feeds themselves.

Once again thank you for the inquiry, and thank you for choosing eSignal!

AveryH