Welcome to NexusFi: the best trading community on the planet, with over 150,000 members Sign Up Now for Free
Genuine reviews from real traders, not fake reviews from stealth vendors
Quality education from leading professional traders
We are a friendly, helpful, and positive community
We do not tolerate rude behavior, trolling, or vendors advertising in posts
We are here to help, just let us know what you need
You'll need to register in order to view the content of the threads and start contributing to our community. It's free for basic access, or support us by becoming an Elite Member -- see if you qualify for a discount below.
-- Big Mike, Site Administrator
(If you already have an account, login at the top of the page)
Either program does what I need. I have used NT more, but I can imagine getting semi-comfortable with SC. Eventually.
Here's the problem: Lately, it sometimes takes SC forever--maybe a third of a second--to respond to mouse clicks. I am working with NQ on very small timeframes, so my reaction time should be the limiting factor. This added delay can turn a small profit into a loss.
I have never seen that with NT.
Multiple good programs say the machine is uninfected and otherwise problem-free.
The computer is wired, not wifi, so I don't think it's a connection problem. If anything, my net service is a little better than it used to be. Ping is almost always 16 ms +/- 2--adequate for trading manually, I think.
The problem seems to go away when I shut SC down and bring it up again, but it sometimes recurs within a few hours.
I have seen similar issues when a program had a memory leak, but SC has such a good technical reputation it's hard to imagine that is the problem.
So, does anyone know whether NT8 or SC is more resource-heavy. Which uses more processor power? Which uses more memory? Whether either becomes a resource hog when a session has gone on too long? Or when too many charts are open? (Pretty sure it isn't that. Half a dozen is a lot for me. Mostly, I use two and very few indicators.) Or otherwise prone to problems I haven't thought of?
I will commit to one of these programs soon. Probably NT, but I don't want to make the decision because of a problem that isn't SC's fault or that is easily dealt with.
Thanks.
Can you help answer these questions from other members on NexusFi?
NT takes way more memory and way more CPU cycles than Sierra Chart, and always has. If your question is about which is a resource hog, relatively speaking, just run them both and look at Task Manager.
With that said, I don't know what is going on with your issue with responding to mouse clicks, which is obviously something that needs to be resolved. With many years of SC use, I have never had this issue, for whatever that is worth.
Perhaps others can respond with ideas about how to track this down. But it is not related to the general question of which consumes more resources. To do the same job, it will always be NT.
Design choices, which are legitimate, and choice of the language, also legitimate, are behind this difference. NT wanted to go in one direction and use one language (C#) and framework, in order to make programming and updating the system simpler and easier, and chose to rely on stronger hardware to make up for the performance hit. Software developers have been making this choice for years, decades actually. SC opted to use a faster language (C++) and to forego a Microsoft framework that simplifies development but adds to overhead. The choices are both legitimate, but come from different points of view. On the same machine, running the same tasks, SC will outperform NT. But if your hardware is up to NT's requirements, you won't care. (You will need much less hardware horsepower for SC, though.)
Which is probably not relevant to your mouse-click issue. There could easily be a bug or some other particular issue at work here.
If you are brave, you might ask SC support. I say "brave" because they do not take kindly to questions that they feel are insufficiently researhed. (An understatement. ) But my experience has been that if you have specific, reproducible conditions you can cite and if the bug is reproducible under those conditions, they will fix it very quickly and with no attitude at all. Attitude comes in when someone doesn't have a good bug report. (Another difference between NT and SC is that, while they both have good tech support, NT is willing to be nice but SC wants you to show them something first. Another deliberate choice, on both sides.....)
Good luck with your issue. Maybe someone else will know the answer already and can jump in here.
Bob.
When one door closes, another opens.
-- Cervantes, Don Quixote
ffejeldnit: I had not seen that page. Many thanks.
Bob: NT isn't on the machine at the moment, so it seemed easier to ask than to compare. Also, here at futures.io, one usually gets more help than Task Manager could provide. As has been the case this time.
FWIW, in sim trading, neither version of NinjaTrader seemed to have any trouble living on an i5 with 16 GB of RAM and a 500-GB SSD. I would give NT more power for live use, just on general principles, but as the only program on the machine it appeared perfectly happy.
If I look at it honestly, I probably was hoping for an excuse to go back to NT8. SC's online "manual" seems written and organized to be incomprehensible and inconvenient, and the support department... Well, I have to say that they have always answered my questions, though sometimes with links to manual pages I also found daunting or impossible. But I always hate asking. Their obvious resentment is just more unpleasant than I want to deal with.
On the practical side, the opportunity cost of devoting hours to my own research is more than I want to spend. Also, my techie chops have deteriorated over too many years. I sometimes don't know exactly what to look up or how to interpret what I find.
NinjaTrader's support department, OTOH, is one of the two best I have encountered in three decades online. Their service is fast and unfailingly helpful, even if customers neglected to study software engineering so they could answer their own questions.
I noticed when I had a sierra chart with market depth study turned on it would become slow and have on average a half second delay to do anything after I pressed a button. The instant I turned off or removed the market depth study, sierra would return to its super responsive and fast normal state.
I think it was just because I had it set to show 1000 levels of the DOM in both directions on a very zoomed out and large timeframe chart. Even something as efficient and highly optimized like sierra charts struggles to crunch that much data.
But if that is not what you were using I find that very odd. I first started with ninja and moved to sierra because ninja was always the slow platform that would crash on me often. I have been in heaven since moving to sierra charts for its speed and reliability.
They should hire someone who knows how to write web pages that people can use. It's all there, but it's a challenge to find anything. They must not use the web much themselves.
That too.
There's a big attitude difference. I never understood why SC doesn't much care about their customers, but I guess there's a natural selection process going on: customers who can stand their attitude and who value their technical expertise and the excellence of the product will stay with them (which has been my choice) and customers who can't, go somewhere else.
NT is a good product and the support is good, but it's slow and a hog for resources by comparison. With the right hardware it is fine, in my experience, but you need more. I actually liked NT7 much more than NT8, although NT8 is obviously the one to use now that the (very extensive) initial bugs are out. But in general, I like the all-around completeness and speed of SC, even though sometimes I do have to work for it.
You pays your money and you takes your choice.
Bob.
When one door closes, another opens.
-- Cervantes, Don Quixote
I agree about NT7 vs NT8. Somehow, I found 7 a little friendlier to deal with. Also, what seems to be more complexity in writing for NT8 greatly reduced my already-limited optimism about ever learning to do it.
If some smart coder would write an EasyLanguage-style add-on for NT or SC, my life would much easier.
As a stopgap, a good book about SC would be welcome. The (well, another) frustrating thing is that I was a freelance writer for so long that I honestly don't know how many books I've written. (It's not as ridiculous as it sounds. Some projects were hard to classify.) But I will never understand their manual well enough to translate it into English.
awesomizer: It does sound like you were asking a lot of SC.
Funny. I don't remember having any problems with either version of NT except when I left it on forever, as they specifically said not to. I switched to SC mostly out of curiosity, because it is said to be so reliable. Thinking of trying CQG, though I understand it has some limitations I would be likely to find annoying. But when I get serious about this, in the next few months, I probably will go back to NT8.
) But my experience has been that if you have specific, reproducible conditions you can cite and if the bug is reproducible under those conditions, they will fix it very quickly and with no attitude at all. Attitude comes in when someone doesn't have a good bug report. (Another difference between NT and SC is that, while they both have good tech support, NT is willing to be nice but SC wants you to show them something first. Another deliberate choice, on both sides.....)