Recent TOS Platform issue - candlesticks delayed

September 10th, 2014, 07:33 PM

Has anyone else ever experienced lag with their candlesticks / charts recently? Not the quotes but the actual chart candlesticks.

I've been experiencing some sort of slowdown once the market opens and there is a lot of activity. The candlesticks start off in sync at the start of the day and will be in sync if I re-open the program but get delayed by about 25 -30 minutes as time progresses during regular trading hours.

At the end of the day when activity slows down, the candlesticks eventually catch up and are back to real-time.

I know for paper trading accounts, the quotes are delayed but the candlesticks have always been real-time. This only started to happen to me the last few weeks.

I randomly found out about the 64-bit version last night and installed it for today hoping it was somehow a JVM issue. I gave it 4 gigs of memory (I have 16 GB in my machine) to make sure it's not a memory issue. But it still happens.

Other observations are:
It doesn't happen on my Macbook (although I haven't tried opening a lot of charts on it yet. I'll do that tomorrow)
It goes away when I close all my other windows and only have 1 chart open.

My desktop is more than fast enough and again it only started to happen recently. I'm guessing some sort of update caused it but TOS support doesn't seem to have any reports of it.

If nobody else is experiencing it, I'm going to guess that somehow something else on my desktop is interfering with the platform but what could possibly cause a delay in data being drawn without affecting anything else with the platform or anything else Java on my computer? (Interactive Brokers runs fine).

September 16th, 2014, 10:44 AM

I called their support a few times over the last few weeks and yesterday someone from their technical support team had a suggestion that seems to be working.

I had set my minimum and maximum memory both to 4GB on the 64-bit platform. He said to set the minimum to 256 MB because if the minimum is set to force it to use more than it needs, the platform ends up 'overclocking' itself.

It looks like things are running a lot smoother now. I'm going to do some more testing w/ my macbook later to confirm.

Just thought I'd post a followup since I'm sure other people have seen posts internet about how forcing the minimum memory up to the maximum is supposed to improve java JVM performance by reducing garbage collection or just might have it up there because it just sounds like a good idea. Doesn't look like it is true.

September 16th, 2014, 10:58 AM

Thanks for the info. I read on their help file not to use the same min as max number. I have 8 gigs in my system and had the software set up for 1gb min, 4gb max and since last week the platform got laggish. I tried lowering the 1gb min to 500mb and it seemed to have helped. I set it to the min 32mb and so far seems to be ok. I noticed with a lower min setting the memory usage goes down, but it fluctuates wildly tho.

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Recent TOS Platform issue - candlesticks delayed

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Recent TOS Platform issue - candlesticks delayed