When I saw that they froze the old staff-moderated forum and moved all their forum activity here where it literally is unstaffed, it literally is a big red flag and shows me that NT8 is not concerned with listening to their customers feedback and they want to dump us all in one place to rot.
This is not a good look especially with:
-Kraken aquisiton
-NT8 keeps freezing
-Bugs with NT8 addons
-Overutilization of PC resources or RAM.. i mean NT8 is letting 1 core work on 6 or more charts of the same instruments on powerhouse GBS with 64 GB RAM / more than 24 cores.. are you kidding me? We live in the modern era not in some backwater archaic ageā¦
Instead of firing your engineers or cutting their pay, how about actually treating them like valuable employees and hiring more skilled engineers that actually know what they are doing?
P.S. oops I forgot this forum is not staffed by NT8 and my comments are left to rot together with other forsaken NT8 users.
The single core for multiple charts of the same instrument is probably by design. Iām guessing they saw that the cost and complexity outweigh the benefit. If there are issues with a single-threaded design, those issues are very likely to be worse and harder to diagnose when you add concurrency.
they were operating on single front with a single strategy focused on facilitaing financial trading for traders. They had a single platform, brokerage, and all their efforts were focused on one thing.
Now, theyve pivoted to:
Superflous trading contests,
simulation prop trading with the likes of TOPSTEP and APEX,
Immense push towards content via social media
The result has been a degradation in their initial operating strategy and focus, and it shows in release after realese that appears to be āvibe codedā.
These āVibe Codedā updates that theyāre releasing implies that their resoures are streched thin.
Case in Point:
Their recent release had a problem, a core problem with the volume profile display, and after hundreds of complaints, they released another update that simply built upon the problem of the last one. And when viewing at this particular volume profile display, you realize how easily the problem couldāve been detected if after coding, it was simply viewed and tested.
And all of this points to resources being streched, thin, the engineering teams are having to manage the online platform, the desktop platform, the prop simulation integration, and they donāt appear to be hiring new engineers, however, if you look at their job opportunities, itās all social media content producers, and superfluous ancillary roles that support content and simulation prop trading.
Iām sorry bro but when you have people depositing 5 to 9 digits into this broker / platform, the benefit outweighs the cost, especially when they have control and access to peoples trade data, only a fool will not be able to make money with this.
People use 7 charts for the same instrument because it provides multi-faceted analysis but imagine support backhanded replies on blaming the core and thread when it is a 64 GB core capable of running two to three instance of world of warcraft in 4K High performances with top notch graphics card. This is no excuse.
NT8 needs to clench their b_utt hole and fix something.
I can understand point 2. If they manage to run their tech and functionality well (which to be honest they are not) they are actually a service to this trading community.
And i completely agree with you its not just volume profile display. For basic things like chart freezing etc, they literally give canned responses instead of really fixing things.
At this point just cut back on the marketing and focus on technical engineering to make sure things run smooth FIRST before doing the marketing.. this is common senseā¦
I understand why people use multiple charts of the same instrument. Iām talking about the technical costs and not monetary. Having three instances of WoW at 4K is way different than needing to guarantee that every tick needs to be in a specific order and multiple charts are exactly synced. You donāt need to be bit-for-bit identical with each other with multiple instances of WoW. You wonāt be saying the same thing if those three instances of WoW needs to be exactly synced and everything in the game is sequential and dependent on the previous. Once you require lock-step determinism across parallel components, you end up needing barriers, sequencing and more and the easy multiple instances of WoW disappears. Trading chart applications like NT, needs strict ordering and consistent state across all consumers.
Having concurrent charts doesnāt mean its necessarily better. The benefits of having the overhead of making sure itās proper like having thread-safe data models, event queues, locking, deterministic ordering logic, etc may not be worth it when compared to a single-threaded architecture. The proper constraints can reduce or wipe out performance gains from concurrency. Concurrency introduces issues like race conditions and deadlocks that literally cannot exist with single-threaded code and can cause all kinds of issues, which can lead to difficult to reproduce bugs. This can make it extremely difficult to maintain the application.
Personally, I havenāt had any issues with the latest updates. If you are not liking the NT changes then just move on and try something else. Who knows, you might like that something else better.
Why would I need 1 hour, 15 minute, and 5 minute chart to be exactly in sync with zero second delay? Sure, Iād get that but you saying that in order to be synced they need to be on 1 core? This is ridiculous. The computer can compute and tabulate data way faster than an average human does.
For 1, 2 or 3 minute chart or a seconds chart, I can understand why this has to be on the same core, but not so much for the rest.
The rest of the time frame, put on a single core makes no sense.
Concurrency introduces issues because NT8 is too lazy to find a good solution.
That makes sense to you if you are a discretionary trader. For automated and semi-automated it matters. For example, enter in 5 minute when 15 minute is trending and if 1 hour closes above VWAP. This requires exactly the moment a time frame closes or tick arrives. If timeframes are slightly misaligned it may think a bar is still open when itās actually closed. Concurrency is not a NT issue. Every platform has to deal with it. You donāt have to be on 1 core to be synced. Multiple cores can do it too, but it requires complexity and overhead, which the performance gains could be wiped out because of it like previously mentioned. Having a single core is just the simplest way to guarantee that its synced. It seems that your mind is already made upā¦ so save yourself some time and just go to a different platform.
Is performance a big issue? I have over 15 charts open for four instruments, each chart with 5 to 10 indicators all running on a mini PC and do not have performance problems. However, I converted all of the indicators to SharpDX that only render to visible area and limit max elements on the chart, skipping historical data if not needed while limiting onrender updates to every 500ms max (when beneficial).
I thought there was a possibility of the Kraken software developers to partner with the NT8 platform to bring some modern updates to the charts but seems not. I run 32 charts at a time so between managing them and computer resources, it can be a headache
This is a thoughtful analysis of the situation. What makes a good gaming setup is nothing like what makes a good trading setup except in the broadest of strokes. NinjaTrader actually does have a good event and threading model and itās come light years from where it was in 7.0. You just need to understand the threading model yourself if youāre developing for it, and make sure that your own code is thread safe and handles concurrency well. We run boatloads of indicators and strategies on NT8 and generally speaking, it works well. There are a few outstanding issues with data feeds freezing, but weāre talking rare occurrences, not daily drama, and until those are resolved we have watchdogs to notify us so we can respond quickly.
