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The details and specifics are as follows:
Comparison between
a) ZenFire+Ninjatrader;
b) IQFeed+SierraChart;
c) CTS T4
During normal markets without news where you have a "regular" amount of price quotes the speed of ZenFire matches that of CTS T4 and is clearly faster than IQFeed. But during "fast" markets, e.g. right after a news release with a significantly increased amount of price quotes ZenFire not only lags CTS T4 but also lags the usually slower IQFeed. I experienced this phenomenon more than a year ago, then they switched servers and this problem seemed to have disappeared but in the last two weeks it happened again twice. I find this very disappointing.
Good questions, guys!
But before I answer let me explain that this was not a planned test. I did not expect any lagging problems with ZenFire because there were non for more than a year now as I said earlier. This concerns the ES. It started on September 13th beginning at 11:30 am CST with the Bernanke news. It lasted approx (I didn't use a stop watch) 2 to 3 minutes and appeared again around 11:41 for 1 min. I had Zenfire/NT running parallel to IQFeed/SC on the same computer. The next instance was Oct 1st with the 09:00 o'clock news and lasted 1 min. The second time I had CTS T4 in Sim mode running parallel to the above on the same computer. Again, this was just an observation, not a planned test. My conclusion is that I can't trust Zenfire in fast markets but I can trust CTS T4 and IQFeed in fast markets. An excellent alternative to CTS T4 would be X-Trader.
Are you assuming his connection can't handle 2-3 feeds, or do you have any data on why a test like this would not be significant?
I have the typical average home 15Mbps rated cable connection (actual speed 21Mbps), and today I monitored my bandwidth use while simultaneously running 2 different feeds (TOS and Rithmic), 2 different platforms, 24 charts including tick, volume, time, multiple futures instruments including CL, GC, DX, 2 DOMs, live pit audio feed, 20+ web forum/pages open, chats, email, other non trading bandwidth using applications (databases, VPN, enterprise client-server platform) pandora streaming music, and with all of this going at the same time, during a busy/high volume market, my average used bandwidth was within 0.4Mbps down, with some infrequent increases to within 0.7Mbps. It's evening now, but I just opened a third platform, on another feed (FXCM), with its own set of charts, DOM, different instrument (EUR/USD), etc and there was no notable increase in bandwidth use.
Point is, all this together only uses a constant 2-3% of the capacity of the connection. Doing something like opening a new web page, or downloading data for historical charts uses more bandwidth of 2-4Mbps, but is not constant, just an infrequent spike, and still only up to 20% of capacity. Anyway, based on my results, I don't see how just running 2-3 datafeeds would be a problem, unless you have an unusually slow connection, or are running something exponentially more complex, like maybe hundreds of symbols on low timeframe volume charts. But if you have data or information indicating otherwise, I would be interested to see it.
Here is a snapshot of the bandwidth use now, just as an example: