Will a better GPU help with TOS OnDemand lag in the charts? The DOM shows the proper price although the charts do not update and can lag by as much as 15-20 minutes.
I run 3 monitors and multiple charts/studies etc for backtesting utilizing a overclocked EVGA 660ti / i-5 3570k oc'ed / 16GB 1600 mhz / 50mb DL & 30mb UL speed.
I have tested multiple ways to reduce lag such as having 3 charts (one monitor in operation), deleting user GUI folder, garbage collection, increasing memory to 8gb available to TOS, increasing amount of JAVA memory, closing all processes not required, fresh installs, etc. and nothing has worked.
I run TOS on both windows 10 and Linux machines. I get the impression that the DOM 'data feed' is different from the
chart feed. Witness what happens under 'fast' market conditions. The DOM mostly keeps up while the charts lag
behind. I think the slowness of OnDemand is on the TOS side, not your local machine (especially since nothing seems
to help, like more memory). I found if the date/set of dates that I'm interested is is 'pre-loaded', that is, goto to said date/time
and pause (for sometimes 5 minutes), then OnDemand runs a lot smoother. I see a lot of 'pre-buffering' indications from the
TOS desktop client. Just my observation. (Linux machine runs a 4K monitor, I7 with 64G of memory and a 1080 Ti graphics
card).
Bill
The following user says Thank You to wjbitner for this post:
Been using tos for 10 years...never bothered with ondemand. I program my strats on my live account, backtest, export, run the numbers in google sheets and trade live if the numbers are good enough.
The following user says Thank You to Massive l for this post:
I have a few more settings/ideas I am going to test. I have been looking to leave TD but I get very very low fees and why I have stuck with them for this long. I might just buy the lifetime NT subscription and call it a day anyway.
The onDemand feature is an excellent concept, but does not work. The ridiculous lag (have a screenshot that shows there is a 13 tick difference) makes it useless.
Hi, I'm a old computer scientist by training and I can make a few suggestions.
The probable cause of most slow computers is the disk drive, I'd kill all cloud based connections then, I'd replace the C:\ drive with a 256 MB solid state drive which only runs the operating system. I'd also add a second solid state drive from which all programs run including Think or Swim, and finally up your memory to the max. The last option without replacing the computer is to add a cpu cooling system.
With all this said, the cause of onDemand being slow is probably the Internet. I notice a slowdown during the hottest part of the day when the neighborhood kids come in to play video games. Also, I don't watch television, but my wife watches Netflix all the time, she will crank it up in the evening while I'm testing using onDemand. Guess who gets slowed down, onDemand starts to drag.
Good luck and let me how it goes,
Wayne
The following user says Thank You to wayneG for this post:
As a simulator, its particularly useless because the only benefit to be had from sim trading: is conditioning oneself to the mechanics of trading. OnDemand produces a noticeably cheesy feel. (sim trading can't be a test of one's decision making ability because there's no risk (emotion) involved).
I looked at it again a few months ago and found that about half of the last 8 equity contracts are unavailable, so if you're looking to trade a particular day type, your choices are slim.
The following 3 users say Thank You to Leon of Pizza for this post:
Another way to speed up your TOS platform is to clear the cache file. In TOS, go to Help, System, then click Collect Garbage. You should see the Free memory figure increase a bit.
when using OnDemand, close all watch list, close as many as study that you don't need.
Sometimes click the pause button on the OnDemand toolbar to give time for the app response to the data.
I have a decent computer, (i7-9700K "4.9GHz, 32GB ram, 2080GTX) and I have rarely any lag unless I speed up all 8 charts at 3x speed (then sometimes it takes some time before the chart updates).
What I do however, is that since TOS can't utilize more than 2 cores on the computer it seems, I open 4 instances of TOS, each instance with 2 charts on. Then when I run on demand, it utilize 100% of my CPU, instead of max 20-30% when I have 8 charts with only one instance open with TOS.
This is probably a network congestion issue with the OnDemand server. I doubt thinkorswim originally designed it to handle heaps of Ameritrade users.
If you watch the thinkorswim program on your computer’s activity monitor you’d see that it downloads a small data packet (historical market data) from the internet every 5 mins or so. When it says “prebuffering...” the application is actually idle with no disk activity until it receives that data from the server, then it starts going again.
So not really an issue with your system. The issue is more likely there are thousands of traders asking for data every five mins so you have to wait in line.
