THE NEED FOR SPEED

Hello Fellow ChartWatchers!

Are you feeling more bullish now?  Last week's rallies have put some needed energy back into the traders that haven't gone on vacation this summer.  Technically the market is mixed and you can see evidence of that in the articles below - John Murphy talks about a positive development on the daily charts while Arthur Hill points out a negative sign on the latest monthly charts.  Clearly the markets have a ways to go before anyone can say a bull market has returned, but last week's trading was the first bullish action in a long time.

THE NEED FOR SPEED

Here at StockCharts, we are constantly looking for ways to get you our charts as quickly and consistently as possible.  Much of the past two months has been spent adding and testing two different "web acceleration" technologies to our site in an effort to reduce the time it take for our charts to move across the Internet.

The first technology we tried came from a company called Akamai.  While this technology works well for other websites and, at first, showed some promising results for us, when we dug deeper we discovered that it really wouldn't work well for us mainly because when the market is open our charts cannot be cached (i.e., saved for later reuse).

The second technology looks much more promising however.  It is called "XIP" and it comes from InterNAP, the same company that currently connects us to the Internet.  XIP dynamically adjusts the low-level settings that control how data flows across the Internet.  It works best when transmitting large items (such as a chart) across long distances.  The bigger the object and/or the longer the distance, the more XIP helps.

(Another really nice thing about XIP is that it doesn't require any changes to your computer - it's a change that we make here in our datacenter.  No install, no settings to mess with, just improved speed - pretty nice!)

At this point we've completed our internal testing of XIP and the results look good.  In our tests, XIP reduced the time it takes to send out our charts by 30 to 40% in most cases.  That said, we now need your help.  We want to make sure that if we switch to XIP it won't cause any problems for our users.

If you have a spare second this morning, please click on the following link and see if you have trouble seeing any of the charts on the page.  If any of the charts don't appear, please let us know.  If any of the charts take a really long time to appear, please let us know.  (If some of the charts appear 30 or 40% faster than they did before, please let us know too!)

Here's the link:  http://stockcharts.com/charts/gallery.html?VMW

Some of the charts on that page use the "old, standard" technology and at least one of them uses the new XIP technology.  See if you can see which is which just by refreshing the page.  Click here to send us your comments and thanks for helping us test this technology.

- Chip 

Comments

[Peter Benjamin]

Daily chart loaded it seems as per normal. Weekly loaded somewhat faster. P&F loaded in a nanosecond.........beautiful!

[Bill Climie]

I use a satellite Internet service in a remote area in Canada. Normally, my charts are a little slow to load, but with this new technology they seemed to load dramatically faster. I didn't notice any difference among the various charts as to which loaded faster.

[Ken Romero]

The weekly and P&F charts downloaded faster than the others.... The XIP solution appears to have improved your site performance. Good job!

[Peter Bracs]

Wow, they're much faster - I'd guess at least 40% faster (and I'm downunder). thanks,

[Bill Menichillo]

VMW Weekly View loads noticeably faster on f5 refresh.
FYI--This is NOT exactly a state-of-the-art system here.
6 yrs old, 1.25 MB main mry, DSL Internet connection

[Maria Serrano]

All very fast; received in this order: Weekly, P&F, Daily

[JWF]

this XIP is super-fast. never seen a chart load up and appear so quickly. great new technology guys.

[Frank Wiedman]

I tested it at about 10:00 PM EST, 7/25/2010. They all loaded fast, on refreshing the weekly (center chart) definitly came in faster. How much I couldn't tell, but it seemed to be instantaneous, wheras the top and bottom chart seemed to have a delay, even though very tolerable.
My location is in NC, on the coast and boarder with SC.

[Bill Menichillo]

Weekly chart loaded noticeably and consistently faster.
This is NOT a state-of-the-art system here.
Six yr old hardware set, Win XP, 1.25 Meg main mry, DSL internet

[Loren Freburg]

CORRECTION.
Upon doing some more testing I see that it is the WEEKLY chart that refreshes first. Unable tell any difference after that. I based my first impression on the appearance of the Blue PPO chart, and didn't realize that the weekly chart also had it. The refresh is so fast it doesn't really make any difference to me. There isn't enough time to really identify which chart appears first.