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Greetings List,
I'm a current user of PCQuote and Quote.com products.
My opinion on the Quote.com situation -- I believe they are suffering under
the load of their success. However the signs are evident that they are
working to address their issues, and their new corporate structure ought to
offer them increased resources through which to carry out their plans.
There are a few things I see that support a positive future outcome:
- they have chosen wisely to outsource their server hosting (Exodus EXDS...)
thus offering them far superior systems management and access to the
internet than what they likely could justify if building their own. An
outsourcing relationship makes it easier for them to bring new distributed
sites on line as well, as Exodus adds new datacenter locations themselves
around the world.
- existing performance of quote servers I have found to be very good and
they they have announced intentions to further improve their server farms.
Problems with performance appear to largely be confined to the users of
their charting applications. I trade through the day chatting with an
on-line group of local and remote friends. When we are all noting that
Charting has gone down or intermittend on Quote.com (QCharts users mostly),
the people in our group that use Dynastore with QFeed most often report NO
problems. The quote server component of their solution is apparently not
always affected by issues that trouble the QCharts users. We've seen this
behavior many dozens of times over the past 5 months so we can assume
there's a reason for this and its not a fluke
Further on the performance issue, I've been comparing what I use now -
PCQuote (am planning a switch soon) to drive TradeStation 2000i to the
qcharts/feed users. I also have QCharts as a backup charting facility in
case of failure with Tradestation/PCQuote. I experience both network drop
outs from PCQuote (appears to be a router near one of their facilities) and
spotty performance. I've traced the network path back to them and also
perform regular ping tests to check out the relative speed of the
connection. I'm finding that the PCQuote servers to my location typically
offer 85 to 135ms response time. Network drop outs occur when response time
is creeping up to 135-250ms.
Comparing that to Quote.com's servers, during normal operation I
*consistantly* receive ping responses back in 30ms if I am connected to a
West Coast server and 70ms if connected to East coast.
I can tell you that 30ms for internet delivery is excellent. That speed is
faster than some of the early hard wired Local Area Network performance!
Now, its true that I use a cable modem attached connection to the internet,
however the real story is that they have engineered their back end servers
and connection to the internet for very high performance.
What this tells me is that Quote.com has made some significant investments
in performance and that they "Get" the internet. So I for one am willing to
continue to support them at this time, I believe we should see improvements
come fairly quickly over the next few months. And frankly, the service is
pretty darn good now as it is, at least for this user.
Sorry for the aricle. I do have a general question for TradeStation 2000i
users that are using the Dynastore/Qfeed combination - are any of you
experiencing any issues that you can relate to the choice of feed? Some of
my friends have some performance issues in charting (chart updates are slow
as ticks come in) but I'm unable to determine if these issues are merely
TradeStation related (likely) or data feed. I tried a test on one persons
machine - manually entered a tick after hours - and could reproduce the
issue in TS. That suggests strongly to me that the issue was not
Dynastore/Qfeed related. Curious to know other people's experience.
Regards,
Mike
-----Original Message-----
From: boturger@xxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:boturger@xxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Friday, January 14, 2000 10:06 PM
To: vibri@xxxxxxxxx; realtraders@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [RT] Re: Quote.com Data
Patrick wrote:
Ever since Lycos purchased Quote.com and changed the web site the data feed
has gone down hill.
So, what is the future of Quote.com under corporate ownership?
Are we looking at the onset of a BMI-like syndrome (ie, continuing
deterioration of data feed coupled w/ circle-jerk customer support)?
Did Lycos make this purchase in the frenzy of internet mania, w/o a
realistic plan for how to make it work? Are they still laboring w/ y2k
issues?
Please, any feedback would be appreciated.
Bo.
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