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if im on a 60 min chart and i select 5 mins, bars just appear without having to reload all the data behind it.

Otherwise, the bars have to be rebuilt again from the tick by tick data. There is no way around this

In case of Ninja - It uses minute data separate from tick data and would "appear" to be faster when 60 minute to 5 minute chart data is loaded.

In case of SC - if the underlying data is tick data ( 60 minute or 5 minute charts would have to be built from tick data ) it would have to build the chart from tick data.

One of those potential reasons why the other program might appear faster to load/switch minute data and might not be same when tick charts ( with same number of days to load as SC) would be faster when the switch to different chart period.

Thanks

You cannot do Volume Profiles accurately with 1 minute data. It is not possible.

This is as fast and efficient as can be, and it cannot be beat.

whereas volume profile is loaded only once using tick data..

And we are certain, that no one is going to beat Sierra Chart with an identical test in this area.

Sierra Chart is designed and structured a certain way

Raaa - I was not making any suggestion on what is right/wrong in this space.

If you take an identical Tick chart ( or any other non-time based chart ) - SC can load the chart very efficiently.

There are few alternate ways where you can have one install using minute data and one install using tick based data and use them in combination to achieve what you want ( you might have go through the documentation on how to get this done) but certainly this is possible.

One thing that we will do, is we will look at the recent changes we made with building chart bars to see if there are some changes we can make, involving function inlining, which might improve performance slightly.

im talking about using it after all the data is initially loaded and i have to switch time frames on a chart with a year's worth of intraday tick data loaded, that's where the issue is. now you would say well duh.. i have too much data loaded.. end of puzzle.

The problem here OP, is your approach, you're side-stepping a very easy technical change for doing things in an inherently slow fashion. It's not reasonable to expect SC to load 100,000s of data points dynamically, redraw all bars, etc. for multiple days/weeks worth of data and expect there to not be a significant delay. This isn't even SC specific either - most chart platforms will run into similar time vs space basic limitations of computing and this is a typical one.

Here's what you need to do:

1. Create a chartbook for each of the instruments you care about.
2. Create a separate chart for each timeframe for that instrument you care about - and you put it within the same chartbook.
3. Assign [ and ] as hotkeys for prev chart or next chart.
4. Assign alt-[ and alt-] as hotkeys for prev chartbook or next chartbook.
5. Additionally, you can save your study collections from one chart and apply them to others so as to speed up the chart cloning process.

You also have the ability to compress data previous to a certain date into a higher time frame to increase the speed of data loading.

you obviously did not read my post clearly. that's exactly how i have set things up so nothing of value there. you dont know my trading methodology so dont assume what works for you will work for me. i prefer drilling down on 1 chart for reasons i mentioned above.

i dont want to get into nitty gritty details here.

SC did a good job already explaining what i wanted to know.

I use this exact same setup on a 15" laptop, watching probably 8+ futures in various chartbooks. If I want to "drill down", I use the up-arrow to zoom in. If a given chart doesn't have the level of detail I need, then I make a new chart for it such that it does. But I usually have the timeframes I'm interested in done ahead of time so this isn't typically a problem.

I read your original post. You clearly stated you wanted to "switch timeframes" and it was slow. Simply creating another chart with the alternate timeframe ahead of time solves the problem.

im talking about using it after all the data is initially loaded and i have to switch time frames on a chart with a year's worth of intraday tick data loaded