what's up traders matt here from the trade brigade and i want to offer you three different tips and tricks to help you improve the speed and efficiency of the thinkorswim app the first thing we're going to do is adjust and allocate the correct amount of memory to the platform itself by clicking on the gear icon here in the lower left hand corner of the login screen at the very bottom you'll notice we have memory usage now this is largely going to depend on how much ram your particular computer has so please reference the guidelines on the screen as a starting point and then tweak from there for me i'm running 32 gigs of ram on the low end i keep it at 10 24 and on the high end up around 61.44 now by no means is that maxed out for my specific settings however i found that it's the sweet spot for me it allows me to also run some background tasks without too much lag there i will say that if you're going to run multiple screens of thinkorswim you definitely should increase your memory usage because you'll be asking more from the platform so it will require a little bit more power and beef from your system itself once you've got that dialed in go ahead and click save and of course log into the platform where we will be adjusting the rest of the settings from within the first one it's a little bit of a shame that thinkorswim doesn't hook us up right out of the box by default with the best quote speed available if you've never gone into this menu before and adjusted your quote speed to real time this is how you do it go ahead and navigate to the gear icon with the word setup next to it go to application settings and in this new pop-up i want you to navigate on the left-hand sidebar to system when you go into system if you've never been here before you may notice that your quote speed is saying something like moderate and if we go in we'll notice moderate is the default you're actually getting a three second delay which is no bueno if you're trying to be a day trader an intraday trader taking you know trades that last anywhere from 30 seconds all the way up to about a half hour we of course want to have that on real time with no delay so we're getting the best data available go ahead and apply those settings the next thing we'll talk about is in the trade tab if we go to the active trader i always want you to be trading in a window on its own for the active trader tab so this is going to be sort of a default if we're trading options right we need to load that in its own window here so our option will by default have to be in its own pane but if you're someone who's trading stocks on companies etfs you name it it's much more efficient to trade spy here in this ladder on the active trader as opposed to running a single pane something like this and turning this active trader on now you may be saying why is that it shouldn't be any different well it is we're technically trying to make this one pane do three things we have a chart we have an active trader and we have level twos right so the more things you load into one cell the more strain you're putting on that one thing to do a number of different tasks so it's always better to load that up in its own sort of window here so we'll type in spy there and now we have our own ladder specifically dedicated to spy we can turn this off and again if you're trading options it's sort of a requirement that you paste the options code into a separate window anyways otherwise your chart would not correlate at all right so the last thing i'll give you a little bit of an extra bonus here if you navigate to the help tab up here in the top right hand part of the entire menu bar go to system okay when you go into system you're presented with this kind of funky looking screen but what i'll say about this is if you're ever experiencing lag and you know the platform is running fine all morning and all the sudden it's bogging down go ahead and check in on your free memory here in the top right hand corner if it's anything less than 500 000 go ahead and click collect garbage and watch what happens to this number here you'll notice that it rebounds up to about 800 000 and it's constantly in a state of decay so it will be going lower and lower unless you know you're not doing anything on the platform and it's kind of in the background then it'll hover and stay about flat but if it's ever decaying more than 500k go ahead and collect the garbage now if it doesn't fix your lag it's not the end-all be-all you may have to reset the platform by logging out reloading it and logging back in those are all the tips i've got for you today if you enjoyed the video or learned anything new feel free to let me know down below in the comments section or by simply leaving the video a thumbs up you