Switchback causing cTrader to lock up

vmajor

Please refer to this thread for some background:

https://ctrader.com/forum/ctrader-support/36628?page=1#9

New information is here. I have resized the VM to 1 CPU and 2048Mb to more closely reflect the production environment.

I started Switchback and News Manager it appeared to run well, for 2 hours. At that point cTrader lost the connection to the demo account and became unresponsive. The system remained responsive so I managed to kill cTrader and perform a clean system reboot.
Upon rebooting I started one of my simple cBots (10kb compiled size) and it has been running for one day now without issues.

The behaviour described in point 1. is also what I observed on my AWS EC2 t2.small instance. Switchback would start to run, but over time cTrader would become unresponsive and lose connection to the data server. In that case I was also able to retain control of the system and perform a clean reboot. The data file I used 4 months ago on the AWS is different to the one that I am using now.

Please advise how to fix this as I would like to use Switchback for my trading. It performs well in backtests and testing on my workstation PC.

I am attaching some screenshots of the VM load when running Switchback (after cTrader became unresponsive and lost connection to the demo account) and my cBot.

Mike

Hi, Victor, thank you for reporting this, the disconnection issue would not be caused by a cBot, you need to contact Spotware regarding this, if the connection is lost then cTrader will become unresponsive anyway.

The issue with high RAM and CPU we can look at if you provide your cbot parameter settings and list all the cBot instances you were running.

If you were to run a backtest or optimisation on this machine then you will see high memory and cpu usage like your are seeing now as cTrader will hold onto the memory and CPU, you need to restart the machine and then start all your cbots.

Please confirm that you aren't running any backtest or optimisation?
Please confirm that you are not running any other cBots or indicators?
Please confirm that you are having the same issue with the switchback on all your machines and it is not just this one?
Can you provide settings files for all cbot instances?

I will probably run the same setup on a clean server and monitor the RAM and CPU usage.

vmajor

@Mike#1024

Hi Mike,

regarding disconnections, my hypothesis is that it is due to the cBot. It does not happen when I am not running Switchback and it does not happen when I run my own cBot. In my very much not sophisticated development opinion this error looks like an infinite iterative loop, kind of like solving for a hyperbola, that eventually occupies all the CPU time that is available to cTrader in order to do its own thing - for example maintain a connection to a server.

I am definitely not running any backtests or optimisations on the virtual machines.
No other cBots or indicators are running except Switchback and News Manager.
I am having this identical issue on Amazon EC2 and on the VM with the same spec, other VMs with more threads and RAM do not end up with cTrader losing connection to the server (as far as I can tell), but with cTrader becoming permanently not responsive.
I can provide the settings. Where should I send them?

Mike

Send your settings to mike@clickalgo.com
Also, tell me what indicators you are using on the charts.

I will run the identical setup for a few days and post back here what happens.

I'm the meantime also send me you vm login details so I can investigate on your server, make sure it's running a demo account and provide a suitable day and time to connect during UK working hours

vmajor

I sent you the VPS connection settings and Switchback settings.

I am not using any charts or indicators on the VMs, they are only used for cBots.

In my testing this VPS server behaves the same as the AWS EC2 server to it should be representative of the target production level environment.

You can connect to it at any time. I am only using this VM for testing.

Victor

Mike

Hi, Victor,

I ran two clean servers with IC Markets Raw ltd for 6 days with the Switchback trading system using the settings you provided, trades were executed and managed, the news manager paused trading, I found the RAM never went above 450MB which is normal.

Also, another machine ran tests in parallel using FxPro and again the memory never went above 550 MB, as no other customer has reported this issue using our product it is difficult to look into this further.

A custom has reported high RAM using IC Market Raw ltd, but not using our products, I can give you his contact details if you wish to discuss.

In the meantime, I will contact the Switchback users and ask if they are having any difficulties.

Mike

We have had other customers report this issue, but not using any cBots or indicators, it seems to happen with IC Markets Raw Ltd, we will continue to investigate on the ticket below.

https://ctrader.info/d/237-ctrader-excessive-memory-use