NeoTicker Blog

Introduced in version 4.30, NeoTicker has a new feature called Multiple Instancing allowing its user to launch and run multiple NeoTicker instances at the same time. I am going to cover the basic aspect of this useful new feature.

Advance Options Add-on

Multiple instancing is part of NeoTicker’s advance options add-on. The add-on has to be activated separately. You can contact our sales department for more details regarding the add-on pricing and demo arrangements.

Enabling Multiple Instancing

It is really simple to utilize this feature.

When you launch NeoTicker with the command line parameter -MI, it will allow NeoTicker to start even when there is another instance of NeoTicker running already.

If you launch NeoTicker with the command line parameter -MI instance_name, NeoTicker will start itself up with its CoreReady object registered with Windows using the instance_name.

The -MI parameter can be combined with the -DL parameter. Thus, it is a good habit to create a shortcut or command file (.cmd) to include both parameters, so that you can reuse the same settings without typing that again from the Windows command prompt.

Planning is Required

In order to use multiple instancing properly, however, the user needs to know what the goals are and how to use multiple instancing properly to help tackling the specific tasks.

The main issue with multiple instancing is that normally your settings in NeoTicker are saved at the same location all the time. When you use multiple instances of NeoTicker at the same time, however, this default behaviour may not be desirable. That’s why we have created the -DL option to allow the users to change the default data location to whatever directory they wanted to.

Example Usage

Several scenarios that multiple instancing can be useful,

1. During trading hours, your real-time connection is active and that you are monitoring several real-time charts. At the same time, however, you are interested in using the simulation server to test run several indicators you have developed.

In this situation, you just need to launch a second instance of NeoTicker using Simulation Server as the connection, you will then be able to do environment simulation on the same computer where your real-time charts are still streaming, and your NeoBreadth and User Define Symbols are still collecting real-time data for you.

2. Experimenting with NeoBreadth on some custom designed breadth, but you are not sure if it will overwhelm the current configuration of your production NeoTicker.

By conducting your experiments on a second instance of NeoTicker, you can be sure that your production NeoTicker will continue to collect your NeoBreadth data properly. As both NeoTicker instances are connected to your data feed at the same time, you can work on your experiments in real-time to reduce the turnaround time needed to deploy new custom breadth data collection.

3. You need to use Grid Optimizer to optimize a trading model.

In Grid Optimizer version 2.0 (coming soon), you will be able to optimize trading models across multiple instances of NeoTicker within one computer. Multiplying that with a grid of networked NeoTicker, you can shorten your optimization time significantly. I believe this combination is the fastest possible optimization technology ever.

4. You need to connect to multiple data feeds.

Each instance of NeoTicker can connect to a feed and at the same time allowing the other NeoTicker instances to subscribe to the data available only to the specific instance. This cross communication technology among NeoTicker instances will be introduced in version 4.40.

5. You need to conduct heavy duty computation in real-time. e.g. scanning, massive data filtering, etc.

Split the jobs among multiple NeoTicker instances. Each can conduct some of the scanning. If your computer has 8 cores, then having 4 or more instances of NeoTicker running in real-time will allow you to fully utilize all these cores to carry out your scanning needs.

I am sure that you can all think of many more ways to utilize this exciting new technology.

Computer Requirement

With just dual core, running 2 to 3 NeoTicker instances simultaneously is possible and can give you the convenience of having multiple NeoTicker running. With 4 cores or more, you will be able to benefit greatly from the power of multiple instancing.

RAM requirement will not be that demanding on a per instance basis. But if you are looking into seriously utilizing multiple instancing, then having Windows 7 64-bit OS will be a necessity because that is the only way you can access up to 192G RAM.

This concludes my short introduction of the multiple instancing feature.