Internet Connectivity Upgrade Progress Report:
On Monday night we moved our site traffic off of our old 180 megabit T3 connections and back onto the gigabit Fiber connection. Later we ran a test of our new automatic failover configuration by physically disconnecting the fiber cable from its router and we saw that our traffic immediately moved back onto the old T3 connections. We then plugged the fiber cable back in and traffic immediately moved back onto the fiber cable.
This means that we should not have a repeat of last month's site disruptions - at least not because of lost connectivity here at the StockCharts offices. And that is a very good thing indeed.
(BTW, we have ordered a second gigabit fiber connection to replace the T3s as a backup circuit. That second fiber circuit should be in place by the end of the year.)
Datafeed Upgrade Progress Report:
On the data feed side of things, we continue to have a frustratingly high number of issues with our ThomsonReuters datafeed. The good news is that because we now also have the IDC/Comstock datafeed, the problems with the Thomson feed have not been as disruptive as they might otherwise have been.
For example on Thursday morning, completely out of the blue, the Thomson feed stopped providing us with US stock information as well as with delayed Canadian information. If we had not had the IDC/Comstock datafeed here, we would have been unable to provide charts of US stocks at all. The IDC feed saved us from disaster.
We are continuing to move more and more of our data traffic away from the Thomson feed because of these problems but the process takes time - among other things, we need permission from the numerous exchanges as we move the various indexes across.
Our goal is to have the ability to use either the Thomson or IDC feeds for all ticker symbols that we track. When we get to that point, a failure of one feed shouldn't disable our charts. Right now, we have that kind of redundancy for US stocks and may common indexes. We are working on getting that same level of redundancy for all of our symbols and hope to have that in place by the end of the year.
