Back testing servers

 

While I am aware that I can go and hire a cloud server, I wonder are there any firms out there that will do this for you. My EA is a little on the heavy side and on my desktop which is not slow wants 11 days to optimise 3 settings for 1 year’s data.

Any ideas?

 
Bremsford:

While I am aware that I can go and hire a cloud server, I wonder are there any firms out there that will do this for you. My EA is a little on the heavy side and on my desktop which is not slow wants 11 days to optimise 3 settings for 1 year’s data.

Any ideas?

Probably not, but u can rent a dedicated server and put whatever u want on it. Although it would be cheaper to just buy a 2nd computer. But it is more likely that optimizing your EA's code is the way to go.

 

The biggest gains are going to come from optimizing the EA code.


But if you go the hiring cloud/VPS route, you may want to check out the features first. Usually such services provide stability, flexibility, convenience etc but not spectacularly fast per-core processing which is what you need for optimizing.


An alternative is to buy a bare-bone PC with the fastest single-core CPU you can find with no monitor, no keyboard, just a small HDD, just adequate RAM and a KVM, just for optimizing. Single-cores are probably difficult to find now, so you might need to settle for dual-core.

 

Personally I have a Quad Core bare-bone doing all my optimizations 24/7. There is no point buying single-core or dual-core since quad-core will get u much better performance per bucks. The only problem is that MT4 can't use more than one CPU core, but thats not a problem since I always have 4 x MT4's running concurrently at the same time. Each one is automatically allocated a different CPU core automatically by the OS. It works flawlessly.

I have 2gb of memory but I would recommend getting 4gb if u want to run opts on years of data (the longer the length of data u optimize on, the more memory a single MT4 installation takes). With 2gb u can have 4x MT4's optimizing on about ~2.5 years of data at the same time without chocking the OS. Any more and it slows down to a crawl.

Good luck!

 

Being able to process multiple MT4's doesn't look like the thread-starters' intention.


Being able to cut down processing time of 11 days for a single MT4 looks like what the TS is on about. In which case, all that is needed is a fast single-core. Generally, in terms of what you can actually buy, a single/dual-core is likely to achieve that at a lower cost than quad-core, for that specific requirement.

 
blogzr3:

Being able to process multiple MT4's doesn't look like the thread-starters' intention.

It's not, but if he decides to buy a pc just for that, then its the better choice. Point is the fact that MT4 is a single core application does not mean u can't use dual/quad core processors and utilize all their cores.

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