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If someone could advise based on their knowledge of computer specs and Ninja 8 demands, I'd be very appreciative.
I use Ninja8 and find my charts are slow to populate, when I add/subtract an indie or change instruments.
My internet speed is approx 22 mbps (I live in regional Australia and cannot get faster speeds)
PC system is described below (purchased 2015)
My question is: Given the below, would I see a significant difference if I purchased a new trading PC with increased capacity? If yes, what would be a "solid workhorse like upgrade" look like in the tech specs, without a Rolls_Royce over-kill?
NT8 usage:
Discretionary trading only
Futures 5 Range charts 10 -15 days loaded
5 indies per chart
6 charts open
No DOM
1 -2 work spaces open any one time
3 monitors/screens total
Effect
When adjusting an indicator/loading an indicator (CPU spikes 15-20%) Memory 32%
Normal operations (CPU 5%) Memory 32%
PC Specs
Intel Core i7-4790K CPU @ 4.0GHz 8MB Cache, Soc1150 0.00 0.00
1 ASUS Z97M-Plus Soc1150 Motherboard (B) 0.00 0.00
1 16GB (2x8GB Kit) Kingston 1866MHz DDR3 RAM with Heatsink (B) 0.00 0.00
1 1TB Western Digital SATA 3 Hard Drive (B) 0.00 0.00
1 250GB Samsung EVO SSD Drive (L) 0.00 0.00
1 ASUS 2GB GeForce GTX760 PCI-E 3.0 Graphics Card (I)
Thank you
Sienna
Can you help answer these questions from other members on NexusFi?
You won't find anything much faster, the Moore's law is dead and while newer CPU have more cores the single thread performance is lower (which is what matters the most in your case).
Thanks for your feedback. I know you are a busy man, but I am not a PC geek so could you possibly clarify a bit more?
1 Are you saying that the newer CPU systems may have more cores, but that those are close to the same speed, or slower? Apparently NT8 uses more that one core, where NT7 only uses one core (correct?) .
2 Would I benefit greatly from 32 RAM, instead of 16 RAM, if I mostly use the PC for trading?(Only NT8 running and only Google or Skype)
I don't want to spend money needlessly on the latest bright PC and am not obsessed about gaining just 10% in extra speed/grunt. If my system seems 'plenty' for my usage as described, that is fine.
So, I am wondering:
if my internet speed is the issue (20 MBPS),
if the newer systems with a newer i7 chip and 32 RAM + newer Motherboard would give me upwards of a major (eg a 30%) speed gain, for NT8. That is, would changing charts and loading data over 15 days, be much faster?
I'm no guru, but your machine appears to have plenty of grunt, very similar to the one I'm using now that I built ~4 years ago. I also use Sierrachart, and am not familiar with NT8 or any teething problems it might have. That said...
I doubt it's your internet connection; we've got 25mbps here and it works great. It doesn't appear that you're really asking a lot in terms of the number of charts; I've got at least that many up at any given time with no issues.
I hardly use any indicators though, pretty much just volume. Some can be very tasking from a computational point of view. Maybe you've got some that are not coded very well. With only 15 days of data loaded, I fail to see how this would be a major issue, but if there were a smoking gun, that's where I'd be looking.
Maybe conduct a test. Pull all your indicators off, and see how well it works then. If it's still sluggish, then you have something else going on. If not, then start adding them one by one and see if you can find the culprit.
Hopefully someone else running NT8 can chime in here. Good luck.
Indeed. And worse still as in most cases the cores spend most of their cycles waiting for instructions/data to be fetched through the L1/L2/L3 caches that have been busted by sparse access OO code, so even when they look busy they're doing bugger all. It is what it is for now.
I doubt it, for what I said in addition to @sam028's point. Best you can do is to seriously examine indicators as @Rrrracer suggested and then think about what charts/dataseries you really need. Usually folks load far too much tick data when minute series and above can cover most needs. I can run an absolute load of workspaces and charts simply by looking at the real requirements from above and below, and that's in NT7.
If you are already in massive usage of large scale memory and even into paging type behaviour then not much can help from a CPU architecture level, you're over the edge and into SSD land. This I doubt however unless you're heavily auto-trading. Multithreading was always a red herring on the performance front, in addition to the cores/cache busts a lot of code can end up in frequent thread locks as well, and most per-chart code ends up running serially on one core.
Also take a look at what ram is gobbled up by active browsers, these days Chrome/Firefox etc impose a heavy load to give the impression of good performance. In your case though it does sound like the single per-chart thread core is stalled on instruction and data fetch while trying to reload data through the new indicator configuration, or you're using tick data unreasonably/optimistically.
Yes, more than enough for incoming real time market data.
Hard to give an exact answer without monitoring probes on the machine to check the CPU, run queue length, page faults, ..., but as you won't reload all your charts in parallel a CPU with more cores won't help, and you won't find a chip with a much higher single-thread computing power. So I don't think you can get a 30% improvement with a newer setup.
