Which OS should I go with for QCharts?

[lugnutz]

Win2K works great! I do run Vista on a 2.4GHz notebook that does OK as well.

Seriously though, 4GB has been plenty for me with my dual core 3GHz machine and lappy. There are memory leaks in 6.0.2. that eventually run mem utilization up quite high, but I have to restart QC (or it crashes) about 6-10 times a day anyway, so mem usage stays at a sane level.

Performance is fine with 6.0.2. EXCEPT I've noticed that $SPX in particular and emini ES/NQ futures to a slightly lesser degree really can tweak one of the cpu cores. (Whatever the bottleneck in QC 6.0.2 is, it does not take advantage of multi core processors.)

Once I moved the futures to their own workspace and removed $SPX, my machines stay idle.

HTH,
lugz

[jmhuff-2]

I reformatted and put XP 64-bit on it. I ordered 8-Gig of ram for ONLY $100 and it should be here this week.

I don't know if its a new clean OS or xp 64-bit, but qcharts 6.0.2 was able to get over 900Megs usage before dying. Usually qcharts 6.0.x would start to lockup alot during high memory usage, and then eventually crash around 900Meg. I was able to get to 1.4Gig usage with a clean xp 64-bit install with only 2Gig before qcharts crashed. I guess my hope is with 8-Gig's I will be able to get through the full market day without crashing or locking up.

Here are the screenshots right after qcharts died.

[tradertom]

Hey Matt,

Try minimizing QCharts occasionally and watch the memory usage before and after you minimize and restore QCharts. I noticed your QCharts was reporting like 1402 MB in its status bar. Minimizing can reclaim most of that leakage for you (at least in my experience it works great!)

Tom

[jmhuff-2]

I went with Windows XP Pro 64-bit edition and threw 8Gigs of RAM in the machine. QCharts 6.0.2 has been running alot smoother now, I can actually use it during trading hours!!

I have also fallen in love with DU Meter.

edit: Oh, and that trick about minimizing yes its magic. I remembered to edit this post because I was at 500-megs memory usage on qcharts, I minimized for a quick 5 or so seconds and opened it back up and I was at 84-megs. Magic... Thanks for that tip