RAMDisk - might be useful to speed up MC

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Stan Bokov
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RAMDisk - might be useful to speed up MC

Postby Stan Bokov » 01 Sep 2011

I came across this concept recently, thought I'd share. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAM_disk

I know some people are getting SSD drives to speed up the response time from the database, but have a bunch of RAM sitting around. Maybe this can help speed up the response time. Warning: this is not an official endorsement, we haven't tested MultiCharts with virtual disks, so test it thoroughly if you wish to experiment with it. It's just an idea to ponder.

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Henrik
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Re: RAMDisk - might be useful to speed up MC

Postby Henrik » 01 Sep 2011

The best stable speedup for MC is a SSD-Raid0.
I have tested the backtestspeed some time ago, same strategy, but difference PCs, SSD-Raid-0 speed up MC very good.

Normal HDD 7200rpm: average speed 62 MB/s to 122 MB/s

SSD-Raid0 (2x Crucial C300): average 400 MB/s
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Henrik
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Re: RAMDisk - might be useful to speed up MC

Postby Henrik » 01 Sep 2011

Testconfiguration: same data, same strategy:

1.) Core 2 Duo 2.5 GHz P8700, 6 GB RAM

2.) AMD 6core 6x 3.3 GHz, Crucial SSD C300 RAID-0 , 8 GB RAM PC3-12800 DDR3-1600 CL7 RH (Latenz: CL7-7-7-24), ASUS Crosshair IV Formula.

3.) see 2., Overclocked to 3,9 GHz


1.) needs 1.52 Minutes,
2.) needs 0.29 Minutes ,
3.) needs 0.24 Minutes for a defined backtest.

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Re: RAMDisk - might be useful to speed up MC

Postby rrams » 02 Sep 2011

I agree. Four raid 0 SSD's eliminate the I/O bottleneck and are better than 64 bit or a ramdrive.

To increase the life span of exspensive SSD's (about 1 year average for me); a small ramdrive would be good for holding the ever increasing amount of logfiles that these realtime programs constantly generate. THAT IS if Multicharts developers would use relative pathnames ($logs) or allow changing the output directory.

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Henrik
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Re: RAMDisk - might be useful to speed up MC

Postby Henrik » 02 Sep 2011

Allow own paths and a safe central backupbutton, is what I miss! And a central strategy tab :-)

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Re: RAMDisk - might be useful to speed up MC

Postby sptrader » 02 Sep 2011

Another option to try and increase speed, is a feature on Winows7(maybe XP too) called "readyboost", if you have an extra usb ram stick lying around, you can try it, very easy to set up too.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/maga ... 56869.aspx

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Re: RAMDisk - might be useful to speed up MC

Postby garp » 03 Sep 2011

I use eSATA flash to speed up the pagefile by readyboost technology, but it helps to increase launching speed of the programs (for ex. new instances of MC and probably pre-saved workspaces) and seems useless for MC database access. You have to put MC database and cache files into readyboost file somehow to get the advantage of technology.

Yesterday googling bring me this page

http://www.superspeed.com/desktop/supercache.php

Where you can see versions of Ramdisk and SuperCache 5 programs. Quite clear the goal of the first one, but the second could be interesting for us. The case if its not just the readyboost analog. I guess: with SC5 all data stored on the disk (more secure), but could be handled with a ram speed. If this statement - true, that will be the best decision. But I didn't try it yet. ha-ha)

Another way - MC developers would be so kind to allow users the choice of database (or any recent part of it) location in memory (with shelduled disk flush) or just on HDD. Every customer has own preferences for speed and security.

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Stan Bokov
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Re: RAMDisk - might be useful to speed up MC

Postby Stan Bokov » 07 Sep 2011

Interesting discussion. Can someone formulate concrete Feature Requests and post them to the PM?

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Re: RAMDisk - might be useful to speed up MC

Postby TJ » 07 Sep 2011

note: Anyone who is using RAM disk should also have a UPS for his computer.
This is to prevent any data corruption due to power outages.

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Re: RAMDisk - might be useful to speed up MC

Postby garp » 07 Sep 2011

I've installed supercache 5 and found two options in the program. The first: you could assign to put in RAM cache of any partition or volume and the second: you could assign to put the whole partition or volume in RAM and mirror it on HDD or SSD. Even this mirroring may be executed in two modes: constantly and discretly (we know that SSD's prefer to write larger blocks of data). This second choice looks attractive for me. Finally I'll have nearly ramdisk speed with HDD mirroring security. With a less expensive solution than ssd raid.

So, would be nice to know how I can move MC database to the separate partition? Does anybody knows the answer?

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Re: RAMDisk - might be useful to speed up MC

Postby geizer » 07 Sep 2011

I've experimented with RAM Disk before, and dropped the idea. Right now I use a fast SSD drive. All what third party cache software solutions essentially do is implementing yet another layer of cache on top of already existing mechanisms of OS Windows. This definitely does not add to the robustness of the entire system, hence I decided to keep it simple - installed the SSD drive.


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