10.1 and tick playback

[gspiker]

Tick playback in 10.1 is regularly causing eSignal to hang. It seems to happen between 3-5 days into the playback. This is for ES #F.

Anyone else having similar problems.

On my system this is easy to reproduce, just download at least 6 days of tick data for ES #F, then play it back. Hangs 100% of the time.

[ACM]

Re: 10.1 and tick playback

Garth
I just downloaded and replayed 10 days of ES #F data and at my end it appears to be working fine (in the enclosed screenshot you can see I was able to replay the entire file).
Have you checked your epf file at around the dates on which Tick Replay is hanging? If nothing seems to be out of order then you may want to provide some more details with regards to the chart and Time Template settings so that I or someone else can try to replicate the issue you are seeing.
Alex

Originally posted by gspiker
Tick playback in 10.1 is regularly causing eSignal to hang. It seems to happen between 3-5 days into the playback. This is for ES #F.

Anyone else having similar problems.

On my system this is easy to reproduce, just download at least 6 days of tick data for ES #F, then play it back. Hangs 100% of the time.

[gspiker]

Thanks for looking at this Alex, I know how much time it takes.

Question: Did you use jump, or did you let it play through?

I can use jump to get to the end just fine (except the results don't match the RT results), but it dies if I let it play through.

The data in the epf file looks fine, and I have downloaded more than one tick file, just in case there was an issue with the file. All of them hung.

I'm using an intraday default of 720 days - 24 HRs a day (0:00 - 0:00). I use a tick playback speed between 50 and 99.

My interval is 60 minutes.

It just starts to run slower and slower and then hangs...but my system resources don't look overly loaded...so I'm not sure what is going on.

Garth

[ACM]

Garth
You are most welcome.

Question: Did you use jump, or did you let it play through?

I let it play through.

I'm using an intraday default of 720 days - 24 HRs a day (0:00 - 0:00). I use a tick playback speed between 50 and 99.
My interval is 60 minutes.

I will run the test again using the same chart and Time Template settings and replay speed as yours.
As to the Intraday Default setting for the number of bars/days to be loaded I don't think that matters in Tick Replay as it is used (as far as I know) only on an initial request to the servers
Will post my findings once I have completed the test
Alex

Originally posted by gspiker
Thanks for looking at this Alex, I know how much time it takes.

Question: Did you use jump, or did you let it play through?

I can use jump to get to the end just fine (except the results don't match the RT results), but it dies if I let it play through.

The data in the epf file looks fine, and I have downloaded more than one tick file, just in case there was an issue with the file. All of them hung.

I'm using an intraday default of 720 days - 24 HRs a day (0:00 - 0:00). I use a tick playback speed between 50 and 99.

My interval is 60 minutes.

It just starts to run slower and slower and then hangs...but my system resources don't look overly loaded...so I'm not sure what is going on.

Garth

[ACM]

Garth
The Tick Replay test completed without any problems in about two hours at a speed of 75x.
At this point I cannot explain why Tick Replay is instead hanging at your end. BTW what exactly is happening when it hangs? Does the whole application stop responding or just Tick Replay?
Alex

[gspiker]

Alex,

Sorry for the slow reply, I'm off at a clients site this week. ..

Thanks so much for running the test. There must be something wrong on my side. I thought maybe it was the screensaver (which pops up as I leave to let the replay run), so I disabled that, but had the same results.

To answer your question, the whole application hangs. It starts to run slower and more sporadically(the numbers don't move, then move very quickly) until eSignal hangs. I let it run for about 20 minutes after the hand to see if it will advance, but it doesn't.

I know the symptoms sound like system resource constraints, but when I look none of the major resources (memory, CPU, etc) are over utilized, so unless I'm killing the disk buffer cache or something a bit more obscure, I don't know what is going on.

This is a pain, since I'm trying to debug some issues I see very rarely when running in real-time. I guess I'll just try to trap the state to a file when running in RT and hope I'm capturing the right stuff.

Thanks again for look at this.

Garth

[Guest]

Hi Garth,

Are you writing to a file? If so, I would try eliminating that and see if things run better. I say this since I had a similar symptoms when the size of one of my files got too large and the repetetive opening and closing of the file was killing me but as I remember the problem was hidden to my monitoring tools. At the time, I think you suggested I use the flush() method which worked wonderfully btw (not sure flush() is applicable in your case).

There are some other things to try like monitoring efs reloads with the postmain functions, eliminating parts of your code, and ensuring unused objects are garbage collected.

Hope that helps.

Regards,

[gspiker]

Ahh Steve..I bet that's it. I'm checking it out right now. I use your trace() function in my script ;-)

I'll let you know what happens.

Garth

[gspiker]

Well...that wasn't it. And based on an exchange I had with Alex I then tried to run the tick replay with no EFS and no studies loaded...still didn't work.

Too bad, I thought sure that sounded like the right answer given the symptoms.

[Guest]

Hi Garth,

I am not having this problem with Tick Replay at all, so your problem is really a puzzler.

All I can imagine at this point is that something must be corrupted either with your eSignal install or your system. The only system issue that I can think of at this time would be related to your hard drive cache.

Regarding the hard drive, you can try a drive diagnostic test, usually available from the manufacturer. Alternatively, check out battery of tests from the pcpitstop site and run their Free Diagnostic Test on your entire system.

[ACM]

Garth
I am equally puzzled and other than the suggestions already offered by Steve I cannot think of anything else at this time.
If you do try to reinstall make sure that you first back up all your working files (see this list) including the xml files with the user defined settings such as TimeTemplates, BarEdits, Favorites, etc
Alex

[gspiker]

Thanks guys.

Actually, disk buffer cache was the second thing to come to my mind, first was the infamous "windows turned off DMA"...but if that were true all my disk I/O would be slow, and it isn't.

I just instrumented my code to dump specific parameters when certain conditions are met. I'm pretty sure I know what is happening (not with playback, but with my code that caused me to want to use playback) and if I'm right I will not need tick playback.

Garth