Trouble with slow quotes/chart retrievals

[WSHHMM]

after using many year, recently I got so troubles. the speed is so slow especialy at the market open. now it is dead.

[DuaneG]

Hi WSHHMM,

Sorry to hear your having difficulties with eSignal. We are not having any issues this morning. If you can provide some additional details about what is happening, i.e. no charts, unable to connect, we can offer some suggestions to get you up and running. You may want to review our FAQ regarding slow data and other performance issues to help isolate what you are experiencing. Also, please PM me your username so we can take a look at your account and verify that things are looking ok from that standpoint. Please let me know.

[aerbis]

I agree. I'll have to get another data providor if the speed does not increase. Esignal seems real slow the last month. So slow, I don't even like changing symbols because it takes over 1-1/2 minutes to load charts with only 2 MA's and I have redundant high speed connections and I even tried at other locations with high speed access and I get the same slow chart response. Especially 60 min charts. Also, when I select a new symbol, some symbol names change while the chart is still the old symbol data and it finally changes after a while. What good is reliable data if it's old?

[Gavishti]

Well, I'm not ready to quit eSignal. But I will agree that chart loading has slowed down over the past couple of releases. This is with no changes to the charts or layouts. And I make it a point to keep the lines down to a minimum. Some layouts have no lines, etc. Still notice the slowdown in loading. Seems to be okay once it catches up on all the back data. The slow loading is even when restricting interval charts to a couple hundred bars and tick charts to 1 day. I have a 3MB connection and test out at 90-95% on Steve Hare's cpu speed test.

[bfry5282]

Check whether there are any "stale" drawn lines in any of the charts and delete them.

I've been a complainer in the past, but the latest eSignal is incredibly fast, except sometimes for gui performance which can lag a bit.

[michaelm]

sad to hear that.

i run 5 charts, 22 efs, 4 quote windows and time&sales without any trouble.

[its1111]

I have to defend e-signal

This is the first time ever responding to anyone, I usually love to read all the interesting things and ideas everyone has.
In fact there are very amazing people doing some very advanced charting work and it is all for the price of the subscription.
To loose any of this would be such a shame.

I have two computers in my home,one has a quad card in it and runs four monitors and one computer has dual quad cards and it runs 8 monitors.
. I also have another computer in my office at another location with four moniters and it is also extremely fast.
I have never had anything but lightning speed and I have more efs sudies running and more lines and studies that take up a lot of memory and band width.
In fact I have to really try to make things run slow. So perhaps it is where you live or you computer, but I would really check into it before loosing all of these amazing people and studies.
Mark

[ScottJ]

Mark, Michael and Brent, thanks for adding your experiences here. It further illustrates what we continue to see when we troubleshoot these types of issues: problems tend to be localized and are not systemic.

To those seeing slowdowns, we really need to take it step by step and eliminate each possible problem that could cause the sluggishness you each describe. Please take a look at that FAQ that Duane points to and try to run through each section best you can. If nothing appears to help, we can start individual troubleshooting by getting a breakdown of the following:

PC specs, # of symbols being tracked, studies used, other apps running, firewall/spyware installed, operating system, etc.

We also want to make sure we're talking about the same symptoms. Do the quotes appear slow or is the problem related to changing symbols and pulling up new charts? I can tell you that we compare our feed against 6-8 other services each week and speed should not be an issue.

We can also take some simple steps like running just eSignal, opening a new layout and running just one chart or quote window (with just a few symbols). Start adding from there and see where performance changes.

We're happy to help you narrow down the localized issues.

Thanks.

P.S. I edited the title of the thread to draw more attention to this subject. If there is any sort of patterned problem, we need as many users as possible reporting their experiences - good or bad.

[pj909]

I have solved my speed issues for the time being by upgrading my processor to the AMD/64 Athlon 3200 and increasing memory from 512MB to 1GB.

Scott, I want to take exception to your comment that it is not systemic. It has been stated numerous times that the number of lines on a chart impacts performance. That is systemic! The best fix is to implement pages the way AGET standalone does and save the lines with a local page file. As a side benefit you could then re-enable the page rotation feature many of us miss.

[ScottJ]

Hi pj909,

Great to hear your system is running better.

Let me clarify what I mean by systemic. From our point of view, if the problem is related to our network, our server farms or the base operating code, than issues would more than likely impact all users. When the issues relate to individual use (like the # of lines people insert in a chart), I'd call that a localized issue since the only way to resolve it is to directly troubleshoot that one situation. Could the program handle old lines in a more efficient way? Sure, but the impact those old lines have boil down to how they are used by each indivdual. Hope that makes more sense.

Thanks.

[ScottJ]

Let me also remind everyone of our new Power User System Requirements. If you track active symbols like the emini, use multiple charts (especially tick charts), draw trendlines, add studies/efs files to your charts, etc. you may be more of a power user than you realize. Memory is pretty cheap nowadays and upgrading to a new processor has become easier as well. Overall, PC's are more affordable than ever.

When in doubt and if problems persist, if your PC is on the border line or under-powered, upgrading it should make quite a difference, just as pj909 discovered.

Thanks.

[pj909]

Scott - Yes, I understand your point.

Are you aware of any plans to change how lines are handled? And/or how pages are handled?

If a page could be redefined as a "chart frame" inside and part of a layout but saved as a separate file then most if not all these problems could be reduced or eliminated.

[ScottJ]

Yes, work is in progress to improve the performance of Advanced Charting and reduce the CPU impact. We try to make some optimization improvements in each new release but I do know that we have specifically focussed on lines recently. Not ETA but it's possible some improvements will be in 7.7 (June 04).

Thanks.

[pj909]

What about my suggestion for how to handle pages?

[ScottJ]

I'll certainly pass your idea along to Engineering. I do believe we are looking at converging the best features of "layouts" with the ease of "pages" and going to a single workspace sort of idea. Still in the planning phase...

Originally posted by pj909
What about my suggestion for how to handle pages?

Thanks.