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I've had experience with running TS2000 on 4 different machines using Win98,
Millenium, Win2000 and now Windows XP. My observations have been:
- nothing causes more problems than TS2K
- memory alone doesnt save it from crashes (i've monitored it till it died)
because even with adequate memory it will choke on the system resources.
- on Win98 and Millenium you run out of system resources regularly and get
the blue screen as a result.
- on Win2000 and XP (and NT) you have dynamic allocation of system resources
so that key problem goes away.
- always do a clean install if you can because windows builds up grunge over
time (sort of like doing an oil change rather than just pouring more in the
top).
- some people don't like XP because its new but its much faster to load
itself and apps than Win2000 so its my current pick. Its also rock solid
stable with TS2000 SP5
- running only one application on a machine is always a good idea for the
reasons quoted and simply because interactions will kill the apps. Cisco
ran nothing but the phone server software on their Win2K workstations for
that reason.
And now the hypothesis that no one else has mentioned in this thread.
TS2000 has a problem with video cards and their drivers.
I've written variations on ELAs for AndrewsBabson lines etc and
found that some of my machines have problems and some don't. The same has
been true of others who tried my software and similar software written by
others. A simple test is to draw a trendline with the fine straight line
and then do extend right and extend left - some people get amazing results.
Running automatic trendline apps under W98 and Millenium could kill the app
and sometimes bluescreen the computer but changing only the OS (to XP) stops
it falling over even though it doesnt always render the trendlines properly.
So in the machines that have been rock solid ... what were the video cards?
It seems that machine speed, amount of RAM, video cards OS and general
purpose vs single application (especially for real time use) are all
important. I don't think Disk I/O etc is ... Tradestation is a memory
hungry/resource hungry/video intensive application ... I'm also not sure if
it runs out of processing power or not. One thing to try (yuck) under XP
(cant remember if you can do it under NT and W2K) is changing the
applications priority so that the TS apps get a higher share of the
processing available. Has anyone tried that?
For my contribution on the video cards, it hates Rage Mobility M3 cards.
John
----- Original Message -----
From: "BobR" <bobrabcd@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: "omega-list" <omega-list@xxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Monday, March 25, 2002 3:06 AM
Subject: Re: Why TS2k crashes -- maybe
One thing that might be helpful is to monitor the available memory via the
W2000 Task Manager. Win2k is much more sociable when it comes to releasing
memory, selectors, after closing applications than W98 or ME are, but even
if your machine has 500 or 750 meg there might still be an available memory
problem that eventually crashes the machine. My machine has 750meg ram and
typically has 300 to 400meg available, but sometimes, very very rarely,
there is something gradually consuming the memory. When I see this I start
closing workspaces one at a time. Then after the mkt closes I reboot the
machine. This problem might not occur for months. Question is, how much
free memory should the machine have available to be on the safe side?
bobr
----- Original Message -----
From: "ztrader" <ztrader@xxxxxxxxx>
To: "omega-list" <omega-list@xxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Sunday, March 24, 2002 8:40 AM
Subject: Why TS2k crashes -- maybe
> Some observations that may help to understand why TS2k crashes for
> some of us. First, I would propose that TS should always have a
> dedicated machine not shared with anything else. That is a baseline
> for comparison.
>
> I have found TS2k to be very intolerant of "pending" operations, that
> is, if you give it something to do, and then something else *before*
> it has completed the first operation, the *probability* of crashes
> increases significantly. I have not been able to produce a
> crash-it-every-time series of actions, but it is quite clear that this
> makes it much more prone to problems.
>
> TS2k has many more problems when dealing with large amounts of
> processing, perhaps because of the above. If you are calculating a
> number of 100,000 bar charts, each with many computation-intensive
> studies, the *probability* of crashes goes up a lot, at least in my
> experience. A possible guideline to this "large amount" might be, say,
> a workspace that takes about 10 minutes to open. This might be one
> guide to "a lot of processing". It would be useful to hear from others
> who are also processing a lot of information.
>
> A number of TS2k "features" are unreliable. For example, customizing a
> toolbar seems to work for a while, starts to get unstable, and then
> fails. I have noticed that the probability of crashes goes up when
> some of these "features" are either unstable or have failed.
>
> Some kinds of operations are more prone to crashes. For example, I
> quite often have crashes at shut-down, even waiting patiently for TS
> to finish what it is doing. It will get about 2/3 of the way through
> closing, say, 15 or so *large* workspaces, and then good old Dr.
> Watson comes up to tell me about the crash. :-) Although crashes at
> shut-down don't affect use *then*, they do seem to screw up settings
> and/or stored information, which in turn increases the probability of
> crashes later.
>
> I believe most of the differences in reliability may be caused by how
> different people use TS2k. Overall, it seems OK for simple use, but is
> clearly *not* an "industrial-strength" system.
>
> Perhaps if people reported what kinds of things *do* seem to cause
> crashes, we might be able to get a better overall picture of what to
> avoid.
>
> ztrader
>
>
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