The more time I spend with AB, the more convinced I am that the flexibility
exists to accomplish most anything I can think up. Having said that, however,
there is a wide gap between what's technically possible and what I
can realistically accomplish --- the limiting factor in nearly all cases comes
down to memory issues. Either AB crashes altogether because of a memory
problem or my machine gets bogged down to the point that it runs so slowly that
waiting for it to finish isn't practical. My recent work has mostly been
focused on running multiple sytems together and handling things like money
management and signal priority through the low-level backtester...large lists
of symbols, but i have my in-cache setting at 11.
I will admit that I am completely ignorant to how AB utilizes my computer's
memory and the relative costs of using certain programming approaches versus
others (obviously, I've slowly learned to try and avoid loops, overusing static
array variables, etc.. but thats the extent of it). So in hopes of trying to
get a handle on the problem, below are a few questions I have...would really
appreciate any input you all might have on a "for dummies" memory guide.
1. I have Windows 7 64-bit with 4gb of RAM - would it help to buy a new
machine?
2. Once an updated 64-bit version of AB is avalable will that
help? (was suggested that i not use the current version)
3. What specific performance statistics can i monitor on my machine to get a
feel for things?
4. Are there any methods/functions that are surprisingly expensive when it
comes to memory usage?
5. Is there some simple math for things like static array variables, number of
symbols tested, number of bars tested, that will allow me to budget when
developing?
Thanks for reading and any advice.
