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As you know, recent global events have precipitated major market movements which has led to unusually high traffic rates from the futures exchanges. Below are some tips to help your trading screens keep up with these market movements:
1. Keep the number of instruments to which you subscribe to a minimum. During normal market conditions it is not unusual for traders to chart or monitor level 2 data of 10 or 20 instruments. During high traffic rates this can cause you to receive more data than your desktop can process.
2. Keep to minimum the number of windows visible as the most consumptive action on a computer is generally painting a screen. The less screen painting, the more resource available for other tasks.
3. To protect its users from stale quotes, if Rithmic’s infrastructure detects that an application has been unable to keep up with the flow of market data, it will break the connection to that app. R | Trader™ and R | Trader Pro™ and many other apps will automatically reconnect in such situations and begin to receive current market data.
Actions specific to R | Trader™ and R | Trader Pro™:
If the clock on your machine is synchronized to a network time source frequently (e.g. your computer synch’s its clock with time.nist.gov every 1 or 2 minutes) then in the Quote Board window, make sure that the Update Time column is visible. If the times shown in the Update Time column, for symbols that are actively trading, is noticeably behind the time shown on the clock on your machine (typically shown in the lower right corner of the Windows status bar) then you know that the data in the app is somewhat stale and can take appropriate trading action.
When R | Trader™ and R | Trader Pro™ show yellow led lights and/or sound the “Slow Computer” alarm, the rate at which data is received by the computer is faster than the computer’s processor can handle. You may reduce the rates at which data is sent to the computer or reduce the frequency at which R | Trader™ or R | Trader Pro™ paint the screen as follows :
1. Subscribe to Aggregated Quotes (at the Login screen, click on the link, Aggregated Quotes). This causes the Rithmic’s servers to send no more than 4 sets of quote updates per second (representing the most recent quotes); or
2. In the Window menu of R | Trader™ and R | Trader Pro™, click on Preferences and then on the Performance tab and use the slider to change updates from 10 to 4 and click on the Apply button.