Can ya speed up 6.0?

[hardtaill]

For those interested, here's a widescreen view of 6.0 with 10 portfolios and 12 charts.

[bobscott]

Greg,

Your Wide image would be great if it were readable. Someone with as much experience as you should know that you never work with JPG's - only use GIF's or PNG's. Both of the latter formats are lossless and all detail is preserved.

~Bob

[hardtaill]

Thanks, Bob.

I know that, and I'll leave it as it is. It's just a little something to show that 6.0 works extremely well with mulitple everything including streaming news and Time and Sales.

6.0 is an awesome program and should be able to be used by everyone irregardless of processor speed (within reason, of course) and virtually any number of portfolios and charts.

I do hope that I get a few super aggressive workspaces in my mail from 5.1 users. I'd love to try a few out in 6.0 and see how they perform on my boxes.

Thanks for your reply, Bob.


'Tail.

[lugnutz]

I suspect a lot of people having performance issues have similar workspaces - likely based on something a tire builder taught them.

I waited until the 28th to make the transition to 6.x. Like most others, it sucked. I can live with having to redraw lines. The few symbols that changed were tolerable but a bit of a pain since even the qcharts FAQ is wrong (hasn't even been updated.)

Like others have noted, the performance is dreadful. I have a 2.8GHz machine, 2GB of memory, dual 22" widescreens... and it is brought to its knees during market hours. Moving the eMini futures out to a separate workspace helped somewhat, but it's still abysmal. Even thumbing through quote sheets after hours takes 10-12 seconds for each new symbol to load. Simply unacceptable.

I don't blame the engineers - they are likely doing what they can with the resources they have to make the transition. Instead, I blame management. To make the *business* decision to force people to transition to the new platform when it's clearly not ready for mass consumption is a POOR, POOR decision. The small dollar savings by consolidating platforms pales in comparison to the loss of customer goodwill that is staggering. If and when a reasonable alternative is brought onto the market, you will hear a gigantic sucking sound of customers jumping ship to that new platform.

The right thing for management to do is to reverse the decision to shut down Miami and allow existing customers to continue to use the 5.1 platform, warts and all, until the 6.x platform has *at least* the performance and features of the old platform. Anything less is shameful.

lugz

[Larry Marchman]

Originally posted by lugnutz
The right thing for management to do is to reverse the decision to shut down Miami and allow existing customers to continue to use the 5.1 platform, warts and all, until the 6.x platform has *at least* the performance and features of the old platform. Anything less is shameful.

lugz

Although indeed Miami has been retired, a new 5.1 continuum/QFeed farm of 16 servers has been created in Hayward, CA, and the existing SantaClara farm remains as is. 5.1 is still alive and will continue to be for some time to come.

LAM

[carbuff]

I have a couple of experiences which I can share on the 6.0 performance trends.

Last week while visiting family and friends, I sat down with a friend who uses the same basic workspace which I do (and several others of you I am sure). I downloaded 6.0.1.2 for him and we worked through getting a workspace converted over. This particular workspace held about 342 symbols in quotesheets with 9 different charts, spread across 4 monitors. We were working on this live on 12/26 during market hours. We had this workspace open using 5.1.0.21 without issue. When we opened the same workspace in 6.0, within 30 seconds the CPU usage was pegged, and the machine was effectively hung...

Just for information's sake, the machine was a Dell Inspiron laptop (a few years old) with a P4 3.0GHz and 1GB of ram. Ram usage was not pegged, but CPU was. Once it hit 100%, QCharts was hung and we were forced to do a reboot...

On my own machine, a home-built Core 2 Duo running 2.6GHz with 2GB of ram, I am at this moment (11am EST on 1/2/08) running copies of both 5.1 and 6.0 with effectively the same workspace (6.0 shows 347 symbols in use, and I loaded the same workspace into both, fixing the few symbols in 6.0 that are different). I have 9 charts open in each workspace (4 e-mini futures, 5 active charts). Using TaskInfo, as best I can tell, 6.0 has been using about 2-4x the processor that 5.1 has been using.

At this moment, I have AAPL open in the 5 active charts on each QCharts instance (relatively high volume stock). I was also using the QQQQ to pull up a high-volume set of charts. My cumulative CPU usage seems to be averaging 20-30% right this moment. I've seen it spike in to the 60% range.

I'm not sure that any of this is helpful, except that I was a little unsure about how real the CPU problem was until I experienced it with my friend first hand. I have seen the variation in 5.1 and 6.0 on my own computer though, but I've never pegged my CPU's, so I've never experienced a hang myself.

[JayF]

Originally posted by lugnutz
...

The right thing for management to do is to reverse the decision to shut down Miami and allow existing customers to continue to use the 5.1 platform, warts and all, until the 6.x platform has *at least* the performance and features of the old platform. Anything less is shameful.

lugz

Lugz,

I believe you misunderstood what the Miami shutdown was about. We haven't forced anyone to upgrade to 6.0 yet. 5.1 is still very alive and operational; despite the Miami network being shutdown.

If you reread the the announcement, you'll see that the Santa Clara server farm continues to function. In addition, we've added servers to our Hayward, CA facility to help with the load that Miami carried.

Our goal is to get the CPU and memory usage issues worked out before requiring people to upgrade.

[Larry Marchman]

fwiw, here's the basics once again...

QCharts 6.0 will take more %CPU on your box than 5.1. Part of the increase is to be expected and is normal. It's due to considerably more ticks in the eSignal feed than the 5.1 feed. More ticks to process means more processing (%CPU) to do. However, there is another component to the increased %CPU with 6.0, and that is certain QCharts program issues that are chewing up more %CPU than it should. Development is aware of this, has acknowledged this, and is working diligently on tightening up the code.

Some users have found the increased %CPU in 6.0 to not be a problem. Reason being that on their box, their workspace just doesn't create all that much of a %CPU under 5.1, and the increase that 6.0 manifests doesn't tax the processing capacity of their box to the point it's a problem.

Some users have found the increased %CPU in 6.0 to indeed be a problem. Reason being that on their box, their workspace incurs a significant %CPU under 5.1, and the increase that 6.0 manifests runs their box into a fully taxed 100%CPU state.

For the users that have the pegged issue, they have decisions to make, courses of action to take if they wish to run 6.0.

1. Cutting down the load that the workspace creates may bring them into a state where they don't peg. Things like reducing the number of symbols in quotesheets, getting rid of studies and MAs that aren't really necessary, eliminating fields in chart snapshot windows that update at furious rates, and whatever else may be viable given one's unique workspace.

2. If doing the cutting process to a point from which they find additional cutting is not acceptable and yet pegging still manifests, then the user may wish to wait until later versions have increased the performance of QCharts and see if the pegging issue no longer exists.

3. Some users have decided that they wanted to run 6.0 now, and as a solution to pegging have opted to acquire more horsepower.

There's no mystery here regarding pegging. A workspace that pegs one users box, but that same workspace not pegging another users box is simply a function of horsepower differences, of differing processing capacities. Or if one day a user runs into a peg problem, but doesn't on another day, that's a matter of different %cpu loads on the different days due to one day having increased market volumes, e.g. more ticks to process equals more %cpu required on any given day, or at any given time within a trading day as the tick rates vary.

LAM

[lugnutz]

JayF,


Thanks for the reply. I'm not a Mensa member, but I do have a pretty good grasp of the English language. I've read the announcement a dozen times, and the bottom line looks pretty clear to me.

Having a single point of failure for the 5.1 network and not knowing exactly when 5.1 support will disappear altogether would require me to maintain a parallel 6.x workspace. If 6.x could seamlessly and transparently import the 5.1 workspace verbatim, then I wouldn't have much of an argument. Continuing to use 5.1 with 6.x as a backup is simply not an option for me, and most others I suspect.

I guess in the meantime I'll build a bigger boat.

lugz

[JayF]

Lugz,

Thanks for the clarification. I see your concern was having only one farm available for 5.1 after the Miami network was shutdown. The good news is that this is no longer the case as instead of building up servers in Santa Clara, CA, we instead added them to our Hayward, CA network. While they are both in CA, they are in two different physical locations... thus the risk of failure is reduced.

Although the writing is on the wall for 5.1, and its end is inevitable... however we'll put every effort towards making 6.x comparable to 5.1 before the upgrade is required.

[lugnutz]

I finally got QCharts 6.0 running on my new machine and with tire builder workspace (~215 symbols) runs fine with almost no load on the cpu. New symbols pop up quickly and the machine is very responsive.

It takes about 1-2 seconds for a new symbol to load (during market hours) whereas my 2.8Ghz old machine would take anywhere from 30-120 seconds. This workspace would not run on my old PC during market hours.

In case anyone else is looking to put together a new machine to handle the new software, here's what I built:
Gigabyte GA-X38-DS4 mobo (supports dual PCIe x16 video cards for future upgrades)
Crucial Ballistix DDR2 800 BL2KIT12864AA804 (4GB RAM) 4-4-4-15 timing (very good memory)
Intel E6850 CPU (3.0GHz Core2 Duo)
Western Digital 1500ADFD 150GB 10000 RPM OS/application/boot drive SATA1.5 (this sucker is fast!)
Western Digital 5000AAKS SATA3.0 500GB media drive
XFX PVT73GUGF3 GeForce 7600GT 256MB PCIe video card, dual DVI out
Acer AL2223W 22" widescreen (x2)
W2K SP4 (yeah, old and crusty but works like a champ)

I reused my Antec case, lightscribe DVD burner, monitors and 430W smart power PSU since they were all fairly new. Cost for the parts was about $1k with shipping from newegg.

Good luck all,
lugz

[jhill1965]

Lugz,
I too am running the tire builder workspace on a brand new Dell fully loaded with fast disk and 4G memory. It runs 5.1 fine but 6.0 locks up. If it doesnt lock then the screens won't all load. I think the major difference between our machines is I have Vista Ultimate running vs your W2K. I think your OS is more stable, but the older ones always seem to be.
I think there is something in the Vista config that is causing the issue.

jwh

[lugnutz]

6.0 hasn't locked up for me on my new machine, though it does have some critical software error about once a day and commits sepaku. I've learned to save my workspace often.

I do have an issue every now and then where one or more of the intraday charts won't show up.... sometimes they show up a few seconds later... sometimes never show up. Sometimes loading up other symbols seems to "unstick" the intraday charts... sometimes I just close and restart QCharts which always seems to fix the issue. This problem seems to happen a *lot* less now with my new computer, so it may be performance related in some way.

My Windoze I.T. buddy says Vista still isn't ready for prime time and recommends XP for now. I haven't had a Windoze OS crash in 4+ years, so I'm sticking with W2K until MSFT stops supporting it in 2010 or they pry it out of my cold, dead fingers.

lugz