Just a quick update for people who have been following our struggles with the fiber circuit.  At this point, all site traffic is still going over the slower T3 circuits.  In general, those circuits are working well but you will probably notice slowness around market open and market closing times. Based on what we've learned so far, it appears that physical fiber connection is fine - it was not damaged like what occurred two weeks ago.  The current culprit appears to be the brand new Cisco router that is used to connect our network to the fiber circuit.  For some Read More 

At the end of my last post, I exclaimed "Vive la Fiber!"  In light of this morning's second major fiber failure, that comment is now extremely ironic.  The fiber connection did not "vive" (live long).  It did not "vive" much at all. Compounding the problem, our cell phone alerts didn't go off for various reasons - thus we didn't discover the problem until after 9:00am Eastern (6:00am local time). After spending 30 minutes ensuring that it was indeed a problem with the fiber connection, we had our ISP manually move our web traffic back onto our four older T3 Read More 

In case you missed the announcement, we are now sending our site traffic back across our high-speed gigabit fiber internet connection.  (That connection was damaged 3 weeks ago - more details here.)  We made the switch back onto the fiber connection on Tuesday night.  Up until then, we had been limping along on four older T3 connections. Below is a graph showing the number of retransmitted data packets that we sent out during this week. Each peak represents a different day of the week - Monday, Tuesday, etc.  As you Read More 

Blech.  We were offline for nine hours today.  That was really, really painful.  I know it was painful for our users also. From our perspective, this outage was as sudden as a bolt of lightning.  One moment things were working; the next moment, nada.  The problem was with our new fiber Gigabit ethernet link that runs from our offices in Redmond, Washington to our ISP's data center in downtown Seattle.  If you haven't read the play-by-play account of the problem and how it was diagnosed, feel free to check out our Status Blog entry. At this point Read More 

Here's a hint:  Nothing. If there is anyone out there that wants to use Donchian Bands on their charts, they can just use the "Price Channel" overlay - it is the same thing. Donchian Bands consist of three lines that overlay a price chart.  The upper line represents the highest high during the specified period of time.  The lower line represents to lowest low during that same time.  The middle line is the vertical mid-point between the upper and lower lines. That description is identical to the "Price Channels" overlay that you'll find on our SharpCharts.  Here's Read More