firemyst
24 Jun 2024, 10:17
( Updated at: 26 Jun 2024, 05:47 )
If not, please provide the version-up products after confirming that they are completely safe to use. Users are in a lot of trouble.
The quality and reliability of the cTrader platform product is important. If bugs occur frequently, the cTrader platform will lose the trust of its users and become less competitive with other companies.
This is so true. There have been many issues and bugs that should have never seen the light of day. It's like Spotware's Developers don't even use the product or have any dedicated quality control / test engineers.
If Spotware had their own cbots running in a test environment, this bug should have been picked up by their team loooooooooong before being released.
What's worse is how much longer it's taking critical issues to get resolved. This freezing issue was first reported end of May. It's nearly 30 days later and it's still not resolved. Totally unacceptable! Not only can we not run bots safely now, a lot of users reported the issue using the backtest functionality. These are what sets cTrader apart from the rest and when these key aspects can't even be trusted…
If Spotware ever gets around to cleaning up this mess, they need to look internally and either start removing people who aren't doing what they're supposed to be, or actually creating a team to do this and ensure a quality product gets released.
There's now at least 3 threads on this issue, plus it has been brought up in the Facebook cTrader group as well:
Best practices are generally not what you described, but more like how specific parts of indicators are implemented.
For instance, there's been plenty of examples posted in these forums (that I've commented on) where people do the “GetBars” on every single tick. Bad!
Or where people have an expression like “x * 3” a dozen times throughout the same method. Bad!
Or where people draw a horizontalline, trendline, or other line, that only changes once per bar, on every tick. Bad!
Lots of things like the above (to name a few) will affect performance. Maybe not enough for users to notice it, but they unnecessarily use up cpu-cycles from the rest of cTrader.
This has been like this since forever. It isn't a bug, just a use case that was never considered by the Spotware team (I'm guessing)
I've gotten around this by creating a static variable in my custom indicators they all reference when printing out messages. You'll have to manage thread-concurrency issues to make sure no two indicators are writing to it at the same time, but this can be easily overcome too by using a built in thread-safe structure like a ConcurrentDictionary or using global flags.
My cTrader desktop versions updated to 5.0.25 today and the “freezing” issue is still there (occurred in less than 15 minutes when starting all my bot instances), so still can't run bots! :-(
I've reported the issue to Spotware and they are looking into it.
My cTrader desktop versions updated to 5.0.25 today and the “freezing” issue is still there (occurred in less than 15 minutes when starting all my bot instances), so still can't run bots! :-(
I've reported the issue to Spotware and they are looking into it.
My cTrader desktop versions updated to 5.0.25 today and the “freezing” issue is still there (occurred in less than 15 minutes when starting all my bot instances), so still can't run bots! :-(
@firemyst thank you for sharing all of that information, I'm encountering a similar issue, running multiple instances (~6) of the same CBot seems to cause the app to completely freeze after 6 or so hours. The CBot logic hasn't changed since the 5.x.x version launches and it ran fine on previous versions with no issues
Hi scottylace,
Could you please alsosend us some troubleshooting information the next time this happens? Please paste a link to this discussion inside the text box before you submit it.
Best regards,
He probably can't. He said the issue causes “the app to completely freeze”, which is the same issue everyone else is having.
cTrader completely freezes, meaning users cannot provide that trouble shooting information through the cTrader app because we can't click into the area to send it, or even get the cTrader app to respond – as per the link to the private video link I sent the Community@Spotware to see the issue first hand.
Have the team not been able to reproduce it with all the information and code I sent? I did another test today, and cTrader froze completely for me once again today. We're going to need a rollback soon if the issue isn't resolved because people are losing the ability to run their cBots.
Thank you for contacting Spotware. If you are looking to delete your demo accounts, you can use the link below. Please make sure you have closed all your positions and canceled all your orders before deleting your accounts.
You didn't respond to the poster's concerns about cTrader and cBots freezing on users. Is @Spotware actually aware of and investigating this issue?
Or do you need to see a video of it happening?
Hi firemyst,
Sorry I responded to the wrong post. Could you pleasesend us some troubleshooting information the next time this happens? Please paste a link to this discussion inside the text box before you submit it.
Best regards,
I have sent an email to community @ spotware with a private youtube link where the issue can be viewed, steps on how to reproduce, and a zip archive with an algo file, cs file, cbotset file, and a README file with all the information that should be needed to reproduce.
Strong suggestion: I would have some overlapping logger going on, because when cTrader freezes, it's toast. There's no way to get into anything in it, including any logging tabs or other areas.
Thank you for contacting Spotware. If you are looking to delete your demo accounts, you can use the link below. Please make sure you have closed all your positions and canceled all your orders before deleting your accounts.
You didn't respond to the poster's concerns about cTrader and cBots freezing on users. Is @Spotware actually aware of and investigating this issue?
Or do you need to see a video of it happening?
Hi firemyst,
Sorry I responded to the wrong post. Could you pleasesend us some troubleshooting information the next time this happens? Please paste a link to this discussion inside the text box before you submit it.
Best regards,
I can't do the trouble shooting information. cTrader COMPLETELY freezes. The only way to do anything is to kill it in task manager.
That's the problem. Something in this latest release causes it to complete freeze up, yet leaving the rest of the computer responsive.
Thank you for contacting Spotware. If you are looking to delete your demo accounts, you can use the link below. Please make sure you have closed all your positions and canceled all your orders before deleting your accounts.
Your code will crash because if there's no label, “Label” will be null. Also, if you have no position, you're telling the code to look through the Positions collection, which will be null. So you need to check to make sure you actually have at least one open position first.
I have developed hundreds of strategies and almost all of them need a fixed timezone regardless where the cBot is running.
So just program in something like the following to get the time based on a fixed time zone and compare whatever actions you need that are time based agains the _Dt datetime variable instead. This has been available since .Net 3.5 I think:
Datetime _Dt = TimeZoneInfo.ConvertTimeBySystemTimeZoneId(Server.TimeInUtc, "Eastern Standard Time"); //or use DateTime.Now in the API call to get the time if more appropriate
Decisions need to be taken at specific times no matter if the code is executed in London, New York or Beijing.
Then if the programmer isn't going to get time based on a specific time zone, they can have it coded in the bot to look at specific times with the C# UTC setting such as getting the time in UTC time and adding an offset. For example:
//if you know the specific time, add it to UTC
TimeSpan LocalUTCTimeSpanOffset = new TimeSpan(2, 0, 0);
DateTime _Dt = Server.TimeInUtc + LocalUTCTimeSpanOffset;
//or if the user knows what time they want things to happen in a specific time zone:
Datetime _Dt = TimeZoneInfo.ConvertTimeBySystemTimeZoneId(DateTime.UtcNow, "Eastern Standard Time");
//then just compare _localDt to the specific time they need things to happen
//or the user specifies the timezone in the directive tag as is currently implemented
Using the above, you have the best of both worlds – implementing the above, users can have their bots make decisions at specific times as they see fit regardless of what timezone cTrader or the server is set to and the code is running in;
when no time zone is provided in the directive and the bots are being run somewhere locally via cTrader, use the timezone the user set in cTrader so those people who travel from Spain (UTC + 2) to London (UTC + 1) to New York (UTC - 4) and back can update their cTrader setting and have the logs and other info with timestamps without having to recompile and redeploy code.
It uses your cBot's timezone. If there isn't one set, it's UTC+0
Well, that's annoying. According to the way it's implemented, if I wanted any cBot to log in local time for the time zones I go through because I travel often, I would have to update, recompile, and redeploy the bot every single time I cross a timezone to update the bot instances with the timezone I'm in?
Who decided that?! O.M.G. face palm
cTrader can certainly determine if the cBot is running locally (and not in the cloud), and can also determine if there's a timezone set or not.
If I start a cBot on a VPS that's set for my local time zone running an instance of cTrader bot locally (not in the cloud) set to the current timezone I want to use, then why doesn't the bot, by default if no time zone is specified and it's running locally, use the local time zone?!
It makes more sense to use the timezone the user has selected in cTrader in than a default UTC+0.
This is not something that works out of the box, automatic timezone detection needs to be developed. Feel free to post a suggestion in the Suggestions and we will consider it for future releases.
This really shouldn't have to be a suggestion.
Seriously, who releases software so that when a user changes time zones, the user needs to recompile and redeploy their code to pick up the new time zone?
When a bot is loaded, and before it's started, cTrader should already know if a timezone is specified or not from the bot's header directive.
If there is none specified, Spotware should read the timezone the user sets in cTrader itself.
Otherwise, what's the point of having that?
Again, facepalm
I'll save Spotware's team 10 seconds with this link:
firemyst
26 Jun 2024, 07:35 ( Updated at: 26 Jun 2024, 08:53 )
Would be great if you'd post this in the forum where suggestions actually belong:
https://ctrader.com/forum/suggestions
I would also include a screen capture showing the text you would like ‘bigger’
@firemyst