No, you can't take any volume of stock with RealTick without having it freeze-up.
HOWEVER, I will qualify that... it will freeze-up RealTick - but - it WON'T freeze-up your computer completely.
The biggest problem with RT3 freeze-ups is that they can prevent you from doing ANYTHING with your computer.
The first thing you should do, if you haven't already, is to go to Windows NT or Windows 2000. Win95/98 are much more susceptable to the freeze-ups than NT/2000. NT/2000 don't really have freeze-ups, but "slow-downs", where it can be EXTREMALLY painful to get to a web browser or even the task manager (to shut down RT3) but at least you can if you are patient.
That's another reason to go to NT/2000. With 95/98, you often just have to hit the big red switch. (OK, I know, nobody really has a big red switch any more...)
The freeze-ups are definately related to Townsend's display code. It's not their networking code, because I've written my own software that can receive data on 5000 stocks and never freezes-up. (Using the Townsend API.) The networking code is robust. (It used to be very intolerant of errors, but that has been vastly improved.)
I would recommend a dual processor setup (you will NEED NT/2000 for this - 95/98 doesn't support dual processors - they can run on dual processor machines, but will only use one of them) with as much speed as you can aford, and 256MB of RAM.
I have a client using this setup with very good results.
I don't run this myself (but am about to upgrade) but have used a similar setup in the past when developing a high-speed/high resolution video system for a golf company. (How fast? How about streaming 50MB/sec to a hard disk array? :) ) The dual-processors made all the difference in being able to gain control of the GUI while the video was streaming.
This is also the cure for some "greedy" DOS and DOS-like programs (such as Quotes Plus's downloader) that make it very difficult to do anything else while they are running. The system becomes downright snappy, and you can run a web browser with no problem while the greedy program is chugging away. |
