Important Poll: Everyone Please Respond

[NinjaTrader_Dierk]

Anyway, you can refresh the chart when you want by overriding the OnMarketData method and then ChartControl.Refresh() or ChartControl.Invalidate();

I would not want to infer on the discussion her, but provide a word of warning: "Constantly" calling .Invalidate() on every market data event easily could overload NT and cause the exact hanging/lagging issue which people experience.

Nor would I want to start a new discussion on that particular topic (there are various of them on the forum), but just put things into right perspective.

[Baruch]

Hi all.
I'm not a scalper so maybe I should not interfere, but I just want to ask the loud traders on this thread. Are you trading through internet or are you connected directly to the exchange? I traded live with "PFG Worst" and had a delay of more then 10 seconds on my data feed. I called them and they tried to help but couldn't find anything wrong. Since then I upgraded my internet connection and left PFG.
I don't know if geeks are responsible for this constrain, but I strongly believe that there are trade offs. Like if you update the chart you also need to run through your indicator's scripts and update them. If you have several charts and several indicators on each of them, you may end up with slower response then 1/2 a second.
So in Utopian world I would prefer an instant update, but I give credit to NJ that they have a good reason for not doing so.

[cls71]

Thanks Dierk for the clarification.
yes, you must pass a region to the method to improve the performance respect to Refresh(). I guess these methods only are used for expert programmers (this should be) whick know how use them.

Obviously, if you use Invalidate() o Refresh() your performance will decrease compared to if you don't use them and prefer 0.5 sec delay.

[NinjaTrader_Dierk]

Hi all.
I'm not a scalper so maybe I should not interfere, but I just want to ask the loud traders on this thread. Are you trading through internet or are you connected directly to the exchange? I traded live with "PFG Worst" and had a delay of more then 10 seconds on my data feed. I called them and they tried to help but couldn't find anything wrong. Since then I upgraded my internet connection and left PFG.
I don't know if geeks are responsible for this constrain, but I strongly believe that there are trade offs. Like if you update the chart you also need to run through your indicator's scripts and update them. If you have several charts and several indicators on each of them, you may end up with slower response then 1/2 a second.
So in Utopian world I would prefer an instant update, but I give credit to NJ that they have a good reason for not doing so.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts.

However, let me try to clarify:
- (as Ray already pointed out): each and every tick coming in is processed. There is not a single tick dropped/compressed/aggregated whatsoever by NT.
- this includes updating of strategies and indicators: they all receive and process all ticks as they come in
- only the chart itself is repainted every 0.5 secs

[Baruch]

Thanks Dierk,
This is even better. You actually allow people staring at charts to blink and not worry that they lost a lot of action. I will discard the development of a robotic arm which supposed to enter up to 5 trades in 100 ms.

[JS999]

If you have several charts and several indicators on each of them, you may end up with slower response then 1/2 a second.
So in Utopian world I would prefer an instant update, but I give credit to NJ that they have a good reason for not doing so.

They have no good reason whatsoever for doing so. It's one thing to make .5 seconds the default setting as it is in NT 6.5, but it's another thing to completely remove the ability to change the refresh rate, and worse, to lock it to the same value on every chart.

What if I want to have 5 charts open with no indicators on them, Baruch? What if one of them is a 1 minute, one is 5 minute, one is 15 minute, one is 60 minute, and one is 1440 minute? The way that things are currently set up in NT7, everything refreshes at 1/2 second intervals. What if I wanted my 1 and 5 minute to update instantly on every tick, my 15 minute to update every 200 ms, my 60 minute to update every 1/2 second, and my 1440 minute (full day) to update every full second? (And what if I had the most powerful computer that money can buy, so that processing is not an issue?) I can get this setup in NT 6.5, and it works great. I can't do that in NT 7.

Even if they give us the ability to change the refresh rate globally to 100 ms, now I would have to have the 60 minute and 1440 minute updating 10 times a second, which is completely unnecessary and draws CPU cycles away from where they are really needed, which is the 1 and 5 minute where instant updates are important.

I swear, it's like you guys just graduated from programming school or something. Have you not been programming software for traders for the past number of years? What the hell is wrong with you NinjaTrader guys anyways? It's like you all just collectively lost your minds and decided to implement this completely ridiculous and incredibly short-sighted solution, that actually claws back a very useful feature from 6.5. Has it occurred to you that some people might be running NT on a very powerful machine with only a few charts open, and that speed is critical for them?

The only reason I can think of for doing this, is that you got tired of hearing complaints from some fools who ran 30 charts with 10 indicators each on them, all set at zero refresh on a Pentium 1 GHz or something. Maybe you didn't want to hear all the performance complaints from some ignorant people any more, so you just decided to artificially limit everyone to 1/2 second refresh. If so, you need to seriously re-evaluate this policy. I can assure you that you are going to hear a heck of a lot more complaints if you are dumb enough to keep things as they are.

61% of people are now telling you that this is a critical issue and that you need to fix it, with another 10% saying that it is important. Last time I checked, we paid you to write software for us that is supposed to suit our needs. You aren't supposed to be telling us what we need, it's the other way around. We are speaking loud and clear here. Stop jerking us around with all this "we'll think about it" garbage and just fix it. NOW. This poll is telling you in no uncertain terms that you screwed up, and it's time you started to listen, so do yourselves a favor and solve this issue soon before you get any more of a black eye on it. Just because some people in this poll happen to be longer-term traders and don't care, it doesn't mean that it's a great idea to ignore the rest of us.... and we are telling you that pretty much every single short-term trader on this board hates your decision.

Because of the incredibly bad way that you are handling this in the last 24 hours, I am already starting to look around at other software solutions instead of bothering to continue with your beta, and I suspect a number of other traders might very well be doing the same thing.

[JS999]

Thanks Dierk for the clarification.
yes, you must pass a region to the method to improve the performance respect to Refresh(). I guess these methods only are used for expert programmers (this should be) whick know how use them.

Obviously, if you use Invalidate() o Refresh() your performance will decrease compared to if you don't use them and prefer 0.5 sec delay.

cls71, it's good to realize that we can actually manually change the refresh rate ourselves through code. I'm assuming that if I just check the current time inside the OnMarketData() event handler and choose to call Refresh() or Invalidate() every 100 ms, that this will work? If I made an indicator that did that, would it automatically refresh the entire chart and all indicators on it at that interval? I also can't find any documentation on Refresh() or Invalidate()... maybe I missed it. Is there a difference between the two?

[NinjaTrader_Ray]

They have no good reason whatsoever for doing so. It's one thing to make .5 seconds the default setting as it is in NT 6.5, but it's another thing to completely remove the ability to change the refresh rate, and worse, to lock it to the same value on every chart.

What if I want to have 5 charts open with no indicators on them, Baruch? What if one of them is a 1 minute, one is 5 minute, one is 15 minute, one is 60 minute, and one is 1440 minute? The way that things are currently set up in NT7, everything refreshes at 1/2 second intervals. What if I wanted my 1 and 5 minute to update instantly on every tick, my 15 minute to update every 200 ms, my 60 minute to update every 1/2 second, and my 1440 minute (full day) to update every full second? (And what if I had the most powerful computer that money can buy, so that processing is not an issue?) I can get this setup in NT 6.5, and it works great. I can't do that in NT 7.

Even if they give us the ability to change the refresh rate globally to 100 ms, now I would have to have the 60 minute and 1440 minute updating 10 times a second, which is completely unnecessary and draws CPU cycles away from where they are really needed, which is the 1 and 5 minute where instant updates are important.

I swear, it's like you guys just graduated from programming school or something. Have you not been programming software for traders for the past number of years? What the hell is wrong with you NinjaTrader guys anyways? It's like you all just collectively lost your minds and decided to implement this completely ridiculous and incredibly short-sighted solution, that actually claws back a very useful feature from 6.5. Has it occurred to you that some people might be running NT on a very powerful machine with only a few charts open, and that speed is critical for them?

The only reason I can think of for doing this, is that you got tired of hearing complaints from some fools who ran 30 charts with 10 indicators each on them, all set at zero refresh on a Pentium 1 GHz or something. Maybe you didn't want to hear all the performance complaints from some ignorant people any more, so you just decided to artificially limit everyone to 1/2 second refresh. If so, you need to seriously re-evaluate this policy. I can assure you that you are going to hear a heck of a lot more complaints if you are dumb enough to keep things as they are.

61% of people are now telling you that this is a critical issue and that you need to fix it, with another 10% saying that it is important. Last time I checked, we paid you to write software for us that is supposed to suit our needs. You aren't supposed to be telling us what we need, it's the other way around. We are speaking loud and clear here. Stop jerking us around with all this "we'll think about it" garbage and just fix it. NOW. This poll is telling you in no uncertain terms that you screwed up, and it's time you started to listen, so do yourselves a favor and solve this issue soon before you get any more of a black eye on it. Just because some people in this poll happen to be longer-term traders and don't care, it doesn't mean that it's a great idea to ignore the rest of us.... and we are telling you that pretty much every single short-term trader on this board hates your decision.

Because of the incredibly bad way that you are handling this in the last 24 hours, I am already starting to look around at other software solutions instead of bothering to continue with your beta, and I suspect a number of other traders might very well be doing the same thing.

Correct, we write software that suit your needs so let be me frank:

- I don't see how we handled this badly since I have not said anything yay or nay. The beta has been released for just over 16 hours of which 8 I was sleeping and another 3 I was having dinner and family time so...I would appreciate a little breathing room
- Some users have performance and lagging times during high market volatility times
- The majority of these cases are directly due to users setting UI refresh rates to extreme levels
- At these extreme levels --> You can get lag of your data by seconds since during high volume times --> There is just a lot of UI processing to do
- So in fact, having high refresh rates at certain times has the potential of giving you a false sense of security since you might update the chart every tick but its delayed
- Having a lowered refresh rate will actually be more efficient for the application and ensure that you get the data updates as timely as possible

That being said...I am not saying yay or nay, I am saying that I will let the community speak up which is what is happening. If you feel this is wrong then do what you must in looking at other software.

[darthtrader]

You will see all the ticks, none are dropped. The display is not updated per tick.

Ray, while I understand that no tick will be dropped with this, doesn't this ammount to aggregating tick data to 500 milliseconds? Interactive brokers is not dropping data per se either, they are just aggregating and shuttling it to the user at .25 millisecond snapshots.

Baruch, if you don't have need for this feature, great. But the robotic arm comment was quite ignorant and unwarranted. While I will admit .5 seconds sounds like the blink of an eye if you don't bother with this level of granularity, its actually quite a long time.

I can also understand that since alot of users would be like Baruch and have no use for this refresh rate that it creates alot of problems support wise with people complaining the charts are slow. A good solution could be simply burying the defaults to turn the refresh rate up so that people who this would cause problems for don't accidentally turn the refresh rate up, but people who need it can at least get to it.

[NinjaTrader_Ray]

Ray, while I understand that no tick will be dropped with this, doesn't this ammount to aggregating tick data to 500 milliseconds? Interactive brokers is not dropping data per se either, they are just aggregating and shuttling it to the user at .25 millisecond snapshots.

Baruch, if you don't have need for this feature, great. But the robotic arm comment was quite ignorant and unwarranted. While I will admit .5 seconds sounds like the blink of an eye if you don't bother with this level of granularity, its actually quite a long time.

Absolutely not. There is no aggregation whatsover. It just the UI is repainted every 500 ms provided there is a market data change that warrants a repaint. I believe you have a typo, my understanding is that IB sends snapshot data ever 250 ms (4 x per second) which is better than what they used to do at every 7/10 of a second.

[darthtrader]

I believe you have a typo, my understanding is that IB sends snapshot data ever 250 ms (4 x per second) which is better than what they used to do at every 7/10 of a second.

oops sorry, my coffee hasn't digested yet...I did mean .25, not .25 milliseconds.

[bobbethgoo]

Great points, I hadn't thought of this.
What I do, FWIW, is set entry chart to 0, slightly longer term chart to defualt .5 and larger still charts say 30, 60 min etc to 1 sec or greater updates.


- The majority of these cases are directly due to users setting UI refresh rates to extreme levels
- At these extreme levels --> You can get lag of your data by seconds since during high volume times --> There is just a lot of UI processing to do
- So in fact, having high refresh rates at certain times has the potential of giving you a false sense of security since you might update the chart every tick but its delayed
- Having a lowered refresh rate will actually be more efficient for the application and ensure that you get the data updates as timely as possible

[JS999]

Correct, we write software that suit your needs so let be me frank:

- I don't see how we handled this badly since I have not said anything yay or nay. The beta has been released for just over 16 hours of which 8 I was sleeping and another 3 I was having dinner and family time so...I would appreciate a little breathing room

The fact that 60% of people were already telling you that this was critical a few hours ago, and the fact that you are still vacillating on it is how you are handling this badly. In fact, I can't believe that this issue wasn't laughed out of the room in your design meetings in about 10 seconds, that's how ridiculous your current solution is. When people complain about performance, that means that they want you to improve the processing speed, not artificially limit what they can see and when.

- Some users have performance and lagging times during high market volatility times

Wow, really? Because according to you on this board a few months ago, "most" users don't have this problem. So we go from that statement from you back in June to a decision now that this is an issue serious enough to have to limit everyone to .5 seconds refresh rate to solve it. Hmmm.

In any case, some of us actually know how to program, and know how to monitor resource usage. It is absolutely ridiculous that you chose to limit everybody because you were getting complaints from a few people. I happen to have had problems with performance myself, but I worked around them with a few hacks to still be able to get very fast updates on the charts that were important to me. When people complain about performance, that doesn't mean that you just set everyone to .5 seconds refresh and be done with it, as that doesn't solve the problem. Your job is to provide a flexible piece of software, not to make a political decision to limit everybody to the same refresh rate.

- The majority of these cases are directly due to users setting UI refresh rates to extreme levels

Again, PERSONAL CHOICE. Some of us know how to use our computers. And I might add that computers are pretty powerful today at the top end, getting more powerful all the time. Some people don't run with a lot of charts. It's ridiculous to limit everyone to 500 ms refresh, and ridiculous that you locked it globally for every chart. Has it not occurred to you that a user might want to give higher priority to the shorter-term charts and make the longer term charts update less frequently than 500 ms? I would think that after programming trading software for years on end, you would understand this very simple concept.

- At these extreme levels --> You can get lag of your data by seconds since during high volume times --> There is just a lot of UI processing to do

Yes, if you run lots of charts with indicators on a slower machine, with multiple days of look-back. What else is new. You were supposed to improve the performance while still leaving us with all of our options, not artificially limit us by restricting the software to a half second refresh. Your users are trying to tell you something here... look up at the poll.

- So in fact, having high refresh rates at certain times has the potential of giving you a false sense of security since you might update the chart every tick but its delayed

I don't need or want your help to prevent me from setting up my system the way I need to have it to trade, especially when it makes your software unusable for my trading purposes. As I mentioned earlier, you could have chosen to make the refresh settable as low as 100 ms and you probably wouldn't have had these complaints, especially if you made it configurable for each chart as it was in 6.5. Nobody said you had to display updates on every tick, just something more frequent than twice a second.

- Having a lowered refresh rate will actually be more efficient for the application and ensure that you get the data updates as timely as possible

If your application can't handle proper data updates with less than a .5 second refresh, then you have very serious problems. On a fast machine with only a few charts open and a short lookback, even NT 6.5 can easily handle a 0 ms refresh with a few indicators, and can handle a refresh rate of 100-200 ms even better. It is not your job to decide what my chart refresh rate is going to be. I highly doubt that you did any testing at all to come to the conclusion that 500 ms was an acceptable minimum limit with respect to CPU performance, and that this was the lowest you should go. On 6.5 we can run with multiple charts at a faster refresh than that, and you are supposed to have made version 7 even better according to your notes.

There is a world of difference between 500 ms and 100 ms for a short-term trader. This is so basic and simple, I can't believe that we are even talking about this.

That being said...I am not saying yay or nay, I am saying that I will let the community speak up which is what is happening. If you feel this is wrong then do what you must in looking at other software.

I don't feel it's wrong, I feel you must be losing your eyesight. The community HAS spoken - look up top. What more do you want? One guy in this thread is a NinjaScript consultant who told you that all of his clients need a faster refresh rate than what you provided.

Let me give you some advice on customer service: When 60-70% of your clients tell you that an issue is critical and you vacillate on it for a few days, you are not exactly providing a picture of a very responsive company. You know that you have already had problems with this in the past. Take another day or two to get some more poll results if you want, but enough people have already responded to this to tell you that this is a very serious issue that you need to change. Even if only 25% of your clients were saying that it was critical you would still need to change it, and the numbers are a lot higher than that.

[JS999]

I can also understand that since alot of users would be like Baruch and have no use for this refresh rate that it creates alot of problems support wise with people complaining the charts are slow. A good solution could be simply burying the defaults to turn the refresh rate up so that people who this would cause problems for don't accidentally turn the refresh rate up, but people who need it can at least get to it.

I fully agree. That is the proper way to handle this.... just make the setting buried somewhere so that regular users won't mess with it, but let the users who know what they are doing still have access to it. Either that, or ATTACH A WARNING IN BIG BLOCK LETTERS LIKE THIS to the setting to warn people about it. Heck, have it pop up a warning message if you want... all of that will rid you of most people complaining while still allowing those of us who know what we are doing to make the software work properly.

[Larry22]

I must say that this is very important for me as I have more then 23 charts on 5 monitors plus about 15 more that are minimized and only a few are set at 0.5 all the others are set at way higher time frame I have some that are set at 360 sec as they are bigger time frame like weekly monthly, so no need to have them refreshed every half second I must say that I use 6.5 and that my PC rarely freezes with these settings, so I would be afraid of having issues if I have not the possibility to put bigger refresh settings on all my charts.

P.S I know this is weird but I want the refresh not for same reasons as others.

Thanks