How to create a lag free workspace

[dtaylor]

I have this great trading system called Algobox. It runs about 14 indicators per chart & I use 9 charts per instrument. The problem I'm having is rendering delay. I can't seem to creat a workspace that doesn't experience rendering delay in high vix. Not sure what road to go down next to try and eliminate this lag. I have the best hardware & internet speed is 580mbps.

I may need to start pulling indicators & I'm cool with that if that's what it must be however even when I pull up NQ lately with no indicators it will be like 20 minutes off sometimes. I'll have 5 of these chart set ups open & the lag will be only with certain instruments like ES & MES will be 1-2 minutes off while RTY & YM are all good with no lag. I've had to just forget about beautifull NQ months ago as she just lags to bad, unstable.


Would you guys be willing to help me create a lag free workspace?

[NinjaTrader_Jason]

Hello dtaylor,

You can experience slow and lagging behavior if you have multiple workspaces, charts, indicators and other windows opened depending on market volatility as well. If market volatility increases, the same setup will need more PC resources.

The 'Calculate' setting for indicators and strategies can be important. If set to 'On each tick' or 'On price change', the indicator/strategy will be calculated on each incoming tick or each price change. During high volatility this can be very CPU intensive especially if the indicator/strategy makes complicated calculations. If you set it to 'On bar close', the indicator/strategy will only be calculated at the end of each price bar.

Could it be you have workspaces opened in the background? Please go to Control Center-->Workspaces. If you see a green icon in front of the workspace, it indicates the workspace is opened and displayed on your monitor. If you see a grey icon, the workspace is opened in the background. Meaning you don't see its windows, but it will use PC resources. You can only have 1 workspace display on your monitor at a time. Please close the workspaces running in the background and check if the lagging behavior persists.

You can find more tips and suggestions to improve performance at the link below.

http://ninjatrader.com/support/helpGuides/nt8/en-us/performance_tips2.htm

[Lancer]

When NT charts are lagging (fast markets, every day), I have yet to see the CPU anywhere near 100% CPU utilization, and usually 40% max. (overall), with occasional spikes to 70% max on any single thread. Always plenty of unused computer resources, CPU, GPU, and memory, so not a hardware overworked or overburdened issue.

[NinjaTrader_Jason]

Hello Lancer,

If you check realtime data in a chart when you experience the lagging, do you see a difference between the last traded price in the chart and the ask and bid prices reported in ChartTrader? You can find the bid and ask prices just below the ATM strategy field in ChartTrader (A and B).

If you disconnect your broker/data feed connection when there is lagging, does the last traded price immediately stop updating or do you continue to receive realtime data in the chart?

[Lancer]

The measure of chart lag is the difference between chart time and market time. Market time is the same as system time kept constantly in synch with a time server, to the millisecond. Lag is measured to the millisecond using the script ChartLagTime here. Other methods of observing lag such as comparing NT8 chart prices to NT8 ChartTrader Bid/Ask or DOM Bid/Ask, or comparing NT8 chart prices and times to other data feeds /trading platforms, or comparing NT8 chart prices to NT7 chart prices can be used as well, and when there is chart lag, it shows in all instances, but using the ChartLagTime script is the best way, and is the method I use.

I've not disconnected from data during lag events (fast markets) just to test what you describe, but no doubt the lagging charts would continue to plot until chart time caught up to the time data was disconnected. Chart lag is not a lagging data feed issue, although that happens sometimes, but that is immediately recognized because ChartLagTime on charts of all markets then displays the same millisecond lag measurement.

The chart lag issue is old ground, gone over many, many times. The bottom line is that NT8 is far from maximizing use of available hardware resources when charts lag. When I had eSignal, for comparison, a 100% CPU utilization event was required to induce chart lag, even with ES and NQ.