vrtrader64 Posted January 6, 2015 Report Share Posted January 6, 2015 I was growing used to the speed of MT being top-notch, but lately it seems that as the day goes on, performance slows down considerably. By the time the US/Canada Equity markets are near the close, MT feels really sluggish. Switching charts is slow, and even scrolling in the QuoteGrid is laggy. I do monitor a large number (near 300) low-activity stocks, and a small number (half a dozen) of highly active ones (like SPY, GLD). My core i5 Desktop has Win7 64bit and 8GB RAM. I use a SSD for my primary drive where the data from MT resides. CPU usage hovers near 25-30% (almost entirely MT) and RAM usage grows beyond 6.7GB out of the 8GB i have. What do you suggest ? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jerry Medved Posted January 7, 2015 Report Share Posted January 7, 2015 is this running log 200 or default? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
vrtrader64 Posted January 7, 2015 Author Report Share Posted January 7, 2015 default log10 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jerry Medved Posted January 7, 2015 Report Share Posted January 7, 2015 the charts you have open generally don't look at anywhere near 60 days. If you don't need that much data, you may want to change the max on the charts (SETTINGS / CHARTS / GENERAL ). Then restart. That should reduce the memory usage and should improve performance. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
vrtrader64 Posted January 7, 2015 Author Report Share Posted January 7, 2015 OK, I will reduce max days on charts. BUT I wanted to emphasize that MT is quite snappy when I first start it in the morning, then gradually slows to a crawl by about 3PM. Also, the large memory use is seen toward day's end, not when I first start running. So maybe it's not all about days of past data. Could there be a memory leak somewhere in MT? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jerry Medved Posted January 7, 2015 Report Share Posted January 7, 2015 will look into it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
vrtrader64 Posted February 24, 2015 Author Report Share Posted February 24, 2015 Per our email discussion, I tried switching to an AntiVirus that allows exclusion of the MT directories from real-time scan, and this seems to cure the slowdown issue. For the record I had previously been using BitDefender Free which does not allow specifying "excluded folders". Now I am using Avira Free which allows omitting specific directories and/or executables. I excluded the following directories from the Real-Time protection: C:\Program Files\Medved Trader C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Local\2GK\Medved Trader C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Roaming\2GK\Medved Trader So far so good. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
timtrader Posted February 24, 2015 Report Share Posted February 24, 2015 You can try what I do to see if it solves your problem. I have my MT set at 55 days of intraday data because I also use it for after hours research. Pulling in many symbols causes the SDATA.BIN file to grow quite large (I suspect your's is over 1GB in size). When I see my SDATA.BIN file grow to over 500 MB after doing research, I shut down MT, delete the SDATA.BIN, SNEWS.BIN, and SNEWS.BIN.bak files (these get recreated at startup). This keeps MT running well (plenty of free and cached memory) as my machine only has 8 GB as well. I had similar problems months ago, but do this regularly and have had none since. (When I first noticed the issue, I believe my SDATA.BIN file was over 3 GB in size.) I have tried the "Consolidate data on next app start" to reduce the size of the SDATA.BIN file, but that doesn't seem to clean up much data space for symbols that have been recently added, even if they have been deleted from my portfolios. Jerry and/or Mike may have a better solution, but if not I suspect this will help.....more memory might do the equivalent. Tim Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
vrtrader64 Posted February 24, 2015 Author Report Share Posted February 24, 2015 @timtrader thanks. I seem to have gotten rid of my slowdown by switching to new AV, but I will try your suggestion to see if things get even snappier. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mike Medved Posted February 25, 2015 Report Share Posted February 25, 2015 The way we utilize SDATA.BIN file, unless you call up a lot of charts that have a lot of data, they do not eat up memory or slow things down. That is, data that is not being used (like showing it in a chart) just sits on disk, and doesn't figure into anything. So SDATA.BIN file can grow arbitrarily large and the only thing it will affect is when you export it or back it up... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
timtrader Posted February 25, 2015 Report Share Posted February 25, 2015 Mike, If I recall correctly....when I had let my SDATA.BIN file grow quite large (about 3 GB for me), I "think" the MT.exe process grew along with it. (Its been a few months....not sure about that.) Then with only 8GB on the machine, the Cached and Available memory would be quite a bit lower than normal, and the Free memory would go extremely low, such as you can see in vrtrader64's picture of his Task Manager at the top of this post. When that happens MT's performance would start to lag as the CPU Usage would go up considerably as well. Shutting down MT and deleting the SDATA.BIN file ALWAYS fixed this problem, so I've just kept mine fairly small. MT also starts up faster with a smaller SDATA.BIN file as well, but maybe only by 30 seconds or so....no big deal there. I can load a bunch of symbols into my charts and get the SDATA.BIN file to get huge again if you'd like me to verify what I've said above.....and perhaps compare it to what things look like with a small SDATA.BIN file. Just let me know. Thanks, Tim Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
vrtrader64 Posted February 25, 2015 Author Report Share Posted February 25, 2015 I had allowed my SDATA.BIN file to grow to about 3GB in size and it probably contained a lot of now-unused symbols. So, following timtrader's suggestion, today I first renamed SDATA.BIN to SDATA.BIN.OLD (to preserve it in case something went wrong), then I deleted it before I started MT. I agree with timtrader that startup time is noticeably faster, though it was not objectionably long before. I also notice that switching symbols in symbol-linked charts seems faster. Hard to quantify, but lag is noticeably reduced. SUGGESTION: (Jerry/Mike) Maybe in the logging, you can put in a timer with 0.01 second resolution to track chart-load times, if you have not done so already? RAM usage is quite a bit lower than I had seen recently. Current RAM usage for MT is 223.6KB where before re-creating SDATA.BIN I had seen as "normal" approx. 650KB. Moral of the story: when SDATA.BIN is smaller, MT works better. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ehjump Posted February 25, 2015 Report Share Posted February 25, 2015 To help verify, I have the same experience as well. My sdata file is ~5GB, and as the day wears on MT memory usage goes up to almost 2GB and MT slows. The charts update realtime data fine, but clicking on an MT function takes a few seconds to respond. Also, my MT takes about 3 minutes to startup unlike the early days (before sdata file got big) when it was a snap. I have several portfolios with ~80 symbols in each and I keep up to 25 charts running during the day. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.