Optimization - CPU or RAM?

[Radano]

I am trying to buy a computer for trading. What is more important using optimization, CPU or RAM. How much RAM is enough, and above this level it would be a waste of money??

[NinjaTrader_Jesse]

Hello Radano,

Thank you for the post.

Really both of those items will be used in a optimization so a capable PC in general would be needed. You can find the recommended system specifications in the following link, you can of course get hardware that is greater than the suggestion to increase the platforms overall performance.

https://ninjatrader.com/support/helpGuides/nt8/minimum_system_requirements.htm

This question will also relate to what you are testing, a very complex strategy will inherently take more resources than a simple strategy so you would need to determine what your requirements are based on what your strategy is doing. If you are purchasing a third party strategy you may want to inquire with the vendor/developer what specs they find to be optimal for what they are doing in the code.

The amount of data you are optimizing over and the amount of parameters being optimized at once will also affect how long the tests take and how much resources are being used. More ram can help with storing information for larger optimizations sets however that will not necessarily speed up the individual tests, that would relate to the cpu speed.

If the script being tested does use a lot of ram that can actually slow down the testing if the ram becomes maxed out, this would really be something you would need to test with the strategy you are using to see where its usage is at. Ram can be upgraded later to increase the amount where a CPU is a little more difficult to replace and more costly. Starting with a higher power CPU and the help guide suggested 8gb of ram may be a good starting point. If you are doing a lot on your PC or have other applications running you may want to start with a higher amount of ram such as 16gb to allow all your applications/Windows to have sufficient memory while running the optimization.




Please let me know if I may be of additional assistance.