The more time I spend with AB, the more convinced I am that the flexibility exists to accomplish most anything I can think up. Having said that, however, there is a wide gap between what's technically possible and what I can realistically accomplish --- the limiting factor in nearly all cases comes down to memory issues. Either AB crashes altogether because of a memory problem or my machine gets bogged down to the point that it runs so slowly that waiting for it to finish isn't practical. My recent work has mostly been focused on running multiple sytems together and handling things like money management and signal priority through the low-level backtester...large lists of symbols, but i have my in-cache setting at 11.
I will admit that I am completely ignorant to how AB utilizes my computer's memory and the relative costs of using certain programming approaches versus others (obviously, I've slowly learned to try and avoid loops, overusing static array variables, etc.. but thats the extent of it). So in hopes of trying to get a handle on the problem, below are a few questions I have...would really appreciate any input you all might have on a "for dummies" memory guide.
1. I have Windows 7 64-bit with 4gb of RAM - would it help to buy a new machine?
2. Once an updated 64-bit version of AB is avalable will that help? (was suggested that i not use the current version)
3. What specific performance statistics can i monitor on my machine to get a feel for things?
4. Are there any methods/functions that are surprisingly expensive when it comes to memory usage?
5. Is there some simple math for things like static array variables, number of symbols tested, number of bars tested, that will allow me to budget when developing?
Thanks for reading and any advice.