The need for speed

["neo" <neo1@xxxxxxxxx>]

I believe that, although important, the processor and memory speed are over
emphasised. The real bottleneck is your hard drive. It runs so much slower
than any other part of the system. The key is to have your entire program
and data in RAM. There are 2 things required. The first is to have enough.
For me this is 512 MB. (This can be decreased by minimising other programs
running. The 2nd is to look in the Microsoft Knowledge Base for an article
on ConservativeSwapfileUsage. If this is set to =1 in [386Enh] of SYSTEM.INI
it forces Windows to use all available RAM before the swapfile on your disk.
Normally Windows will use 50% of RAM and then start using the swapfile on
your disk. This is probably a holdover from when we had tiny MBs of RAM. If
you have Norton SystemWorks or another program to monitor RAM and swapfile
(virtual memory) used you will see the difference at once.

In a recent example, in another program, I had pulled out a 128 MB card and
the time it took to open a chart went from < 1 second to about 20 seconds as
I saw my hard drive searching for the data.

One other note. I have heard from various sources that programs leak memory.
That is, if you use a program all, or part, of it will remain in RAM and not
be available to other programs. I cannot confirm this. The program does stay
in memory but I believe it is over written as needed. If this leak is true
then it would help to reboot you system from time to time.

Disclaimer: I have been doing this for well over a year with Win98 (1st Ed.)
and it works great without a single problem. If you do this I have no
responsibility for what might happen to your system. Look at MS's Knowledge
Base and try it if YOU decide to. This is only my personal information.

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-metastock@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:owner-metastock@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]On Behalf Of Rance Nunes
Sent: Friday, November 03, 2000 12:13 PM
To: metastock@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Real-time screening of multiple stocks possible?


In MetaStock Professional the documentation states that (paraphrasing)
	The Explorer’s performance is significantly slower on intraday data
	while collecting real-time data.

Can real-time searches be performed in MetaStock Pro?

If so what is the order of magnitude of stocks that can be screened in
real-time?  That is, if a real-time Exploration is designed, how many
simultaneous stocks can be screened when using tick by tick information
while
collecting real-time data?  (Say on a 1-Gigahertz Pentium III with 256 Megs
of
memory).

Any assistance is appreciated.

Thanks.

Rance