Regarding Schwab's new 'Velocity' Trading software,
Thanks for the advice Mark, but what are you basing your response on?
My own experimentation with Velocity + 20+ years of programming experience.
Are you saying you believe this kind of software creates a compounding resource drain within a users system?-Why?
Not quite sure what 'compounding resource drain' means but yes, each time you run & shut down Velocity, it leaves less memory available to you (and, again, if this sounds suspicious you can test this yourself). Eventually, if you don't reboot before each launching of Velocity, you will have 0 memory left and your machine would crash. Now obviously the crashing part would depend on how much memory your machine has & how frequently you might launch Velocity before rebooting your machine. So far as why - poor engineering. Win 3.1 programs use to do this all the time (even Msft's Word). Its rather unusual to see this in a Win 95/98/NT program.
"You could repeat 2-4 (times?)until such time as Velocity ultimately disables all your system's memory and crashes your machine."--Where do you get these ideas Mark?
Experimentation w/Velocity. Again, if this sounds suspicious to you, run SYSMON (or if you have something more sophisticated to monitor memory usage, use that). Check the % of memory available prior to launching Velocity. Launch Velocity. Shut it down. Re-check the % of memory available. Re-launch Velocity. Shut it down. Check the % again. Each time the % will be less than before. You could repeat this ad infinitum and eventually you'll have too little memory for your computer to function and it will crash. Obviously, this will all depend on the amount of memory you have to begin with and, from a practical perspective, how frequently you launch & shut down Velocity before rebooting your machine. If you launch Velocity, say, once a day and reboot daily, then this probably won't be a problem. Velocity, btw, also uses a lot of memory which is why I can't see leaving it running 6.5 hours/day i.e. while the market is open. I have too much other software (quotes, charts, direct order entry software, etc.) that's more critical.
Finally, Schwab has confirmed this problem via their own experimentation. I was disappointed that they (or the vendor they outsourced Velocity's development to) didn't fix this in the latest release. Then again, they've confirmed 2 bugs (can't leg into put spreads, can't close out option positions in Keough accts) in the web software that were reported in early 1998 and those still aren't fixed. This all suggests the priority is adding more features and not worrying too much if it works well or not. |
