Now that Investor/RT 14 is available as a general release, it is a good time to provide an overview of the road map ahead for the RT platform. First, let’s start with some history.
Investor/RT was originally designed and developed to utilize a powerful database management system (DBMS). Investor/RT was the first charting platform for personal computers to employ a commercial DBMS system to house all user setups and market data. The database system used by Investor/RT was chosen because it is high performance and cross-platform, enabling Linn Software to publish versions of Investor/RT over the years for both Windows and Apple Macintosh systems.
Investor/RT 13 is the final release of the RT platform that utilizes the original database system. Because both RT 13 and the original database software are 32-bit, RT 13 is subject to database file size limitations (2GB max per db file). While this limitation is not an issue for user content, it does limit the amount of intra-day historical data RT can maintain locally on the database. The 32-bit DBMS is highly optimized for use with data residing on slower hard drives.
Investor/RT 14 is 32-bit, developed to use a more modern 64-bit compatible database system. The move to a 64-bit DBMS is a necessary first step in transitioning the Investor/RT platform to 64-bit. Although the content of the RT 14 database is very much the same, a migration of RT 13 content is required the first time RT 14 is run after upgrading.
During recent beta and candidate testing some users have reported that RT 14 operates faster, seemingly with better performance characteristics. Others have reported the opposite. RT 14 runs best when the database files are located on a SSD (solid state drive) rather than a HDD (hard disk drive). Older computers with limited memory and rotating storage media, especially older laptops that typically have slower drives, may not run some database tasks as quickly in RT 14 as they do in RT 13. For this reason, RT 13 will remain available, fully supported for a period of time, although new features may require upgrading to RT 14. In general, ongoing enhancements to Linn Software RTX® Extensions will continue to be available to RT 13 users. New features and enhancement within the core platform will be released in subsequent maintenance releases of RT 14.
Work has been underway for some time on transitioning RT to 64-bit. Modern PCs use 64-bit processors. Investor/RT will soon be able to take full advantage of the 64-bit processing speed and larger memory footprint 64-bit apps can have.
We will begin public beta testing of RT 15 for Windows x64 soon. Initial beta test releases will have more limited support for market data sources and brokerage connectivity than RT 14. When beta testing begins we expect to support IQFeed, CQG, and Rithmic, with other data sources to follow during the beta testing period.
Additionally, for RT 15, the RTX software development toolkit (SDK) has been updated to 64-bit. Upon initial beta release, all Linn Software developed RTX extensions will be available on the RT 15 64-bit platform.
Please post any comments or questions below.
Hello Bill,
this detailed information on the roadmap is very much appreciated.
A quick question : among the various benefits of moving to a full 64-bit environment, do you also expect also some benefits in term of multi-thread support ?
Will you be able to split the global IRT CPU load (charts, quote page etc) among various core ?
I know that some specific trading software features or task might be difficult to split among various threads and that this might create synchronization issues...
Thank you in advance for the feedback
Eddy
While we do expect a postive bump in performance with RT 15 64-bit, there is no fundamental change in the mutli-threading that the product does. Separate threads are used for market data reception, historical data downloading, web site downloading of futures definitions, checking for updates to the core platform or for individual RTX extensions. All charting and quotepage rendering is done by the InvestorRT main thread. As you know, another way to engage more processing cores is to run multiple instances of RT on the same machine in parallel. Each instance has its own database and can be configured to use the same or different market data sources. Each instance will run faster in x64 and more threads will be working independently for very demanding usage scenarios. Using separate threads for each chart or quotepage is not possible technically due to threading restrictions of the C/C++ toolkit used to build RT since inception.
Hello,
would there be any chance to see in the future, multicores support with optimization? It would benefit greatly.
Or would it need major software rewrite?