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Perhaps these questions are mostly hardware and Windows 8, but they specifically relate to Ninja for me.
I just bought a laptop with a 2.4ghz I7 quad core chip and Windows 8 Home. 8 gig RAM. (Most of the software I had on Windows XP runs ok on Windows 8.) I cloned the disk image to a SSD and boot from there...really fast boot.
When I go to task manager, it shows 8 logical CPUs and not the 4 quad CPUs. The Logical CPUs surprised me.
My questions are:
1) I understand that Ninja is single threaded, except for back testing. Is there any way I can dedicate one physical core completely to NT, that is, two logical processors?
2) Is the Logical CPU created by Windows 8 or a feature of chip?
3) If Windows 8 creates the Logical CPU, can I tell it to not create the Logical CPUs and run as 4 CPU?
My concern is that this fast machine would only allocate 1/8 of its power to Ninja, when the reason I bought it was to make sure NT had all the CPU it needed.
4) I have an old HP XW6200 workstation in storage (in another country) with dual discreet 3.8ghz Xeon processors With multi monitor video cards it will run up to 8 monitors. It seems to me that a single threaded Ninja might run faster on this machine? (If the machine was only running Ninja?) Is that true?
(the cost of shipping the workstation international is far more than its value)
Any experts out there?
Can you help answer these questions from other members on NexusFi?
Exists due to the hyper-thread construction of the chip. Same result in any supporting O/S.
No, and it would make no difference.
It is the same problem for all of us, the main charting/display/indicator code is single threaded and we are stuck with it. NT 8 may offer some improvements but that's a way off yet. Imho NT7 is still plenty fast enough on such a good machine even though it is frustrating to see 12.5% on a task manager.... (at least it means lots of other stuff can run easily at the same time.) Just manage your amounts of tick data and charts and run sensibly coded indicators. Plenty of good threads on futures.io (formerly BMT) to peruse for great information.
It would also run Ninja well but I doubt worth the cost of shipping, maybe better to leave where it is and just use it when you are there?
maybe I should just run Ninja on my old 1.7ghz centrino laptop with xp....it may be just as fast....because that chip was equivalent to a 2.4ghz desktop chip
(just being whimsical)
When I get back home I will see if there is any way to disable the hyperthread...Windows 8 makes it difficult to access BIOS, and I imagine that is where the setting is, if there is one
I really wouldn't waste time in this area, I run a Compaq 8 core i7, loads of workspaces/charts/etc/etc always open, CPU in task manager averages between 2-5% all day apart from occasional bursts.
I have been running NT on an I7 machine @ 3.4Ghz with Win 8 (64-bit) since December. I can tell you that it works just fine. The main advantage that I see is that I can run several other apps simultaneously without seeing any slowdown on NT even during fast markets.
Sorry to be resurrecting an old thread, but I have a closely related question and it seemed better to put it here rather than start a new thread.
I am programming my own indicator with its own genetic algorithm optimisation. (There are various reasons I am going down this route.) Everything is done within the indicator itself, including parallel computation of fitness of multiple "solutions" (parameter settings of the indicator) at once.
The parameter settings are optimised thus by simply attaching the indicator to a chart. Now I am near the end of the development phase and getting closer to testing phase, I need to purchase a new workstation for the increased computational requirements.
Since everything is done in the indicator code, does this mean I am stuck with a single thread on a multi-thread machine? That would suck. If this is true, what should I purchase? I am guessing that going 8 cores instead of 4 isn't going to make a lot of difference to me, unless I want to future-proof for NJ 8?
I bought an Asus N56 laptop. I7, 4 cores, hyperthreaded to 8 virtual cores. 8meg ram, SSD hard drive. Windows 8. A second monitor. 2.4ghz per core, boost to 3.?.
The Bios of this machine does not allow me to turn off the hyperthreading.
I run several charts with each with 5 of my own custom indicators,
and two indicators in Market Analyzer across 6-7 instruments
And rarely does the machine even go above 25% memory or 15% cpu. Usually it is under 10% CPU. What makes it go higher than 10% is if I launch a video recorder to capture my thoughts and charts.
This is the total CPU usage across 4 cores, I think. I don't know how Task Manager reports just a single core. NT would be running on just one of the four physical cores and then on just one of the two virtual cores, I suppose.
There seems to be some issue with Windows 8 as sometimes NT will not shut down and I have to use Task Manager to stop it. So far I have not found the problem. This happens even when I run NT in administrator mode, and I've checked all the firewall settings. Didn't have this problem with Windows XP.