There are periodic problems with accessing HIMIPref™ over a network – problems that appear to flummox networking specialists. I know I’m flummoxed!
The problem arises from the length of time it takes to perform the calculations: in the full institutional version of HIMIPref™ all calculations are performed from scratch. It’s done this way because I want to provide massive amounts of intermediate data to clients for verification and explanatory purposes and it’s easier to produce all this stuff de novo than to write it to files then read it and transmit it separately.
Anyway, when logging in to HIMIPref™, you see notifications of fundamental data coming in (dividends, options …) then a wait screen while the calculations are performed. In some systems, particularly with proxy-servers, the system will hang as the client programme waits for data from the server that just ain’t coming. I never see this problem with direct connections.
Rather than endure any more speculation from network technicians that I just plain can’t write code, I have developed a Connection Test [Link updated 2024-3-22]. It uses the same technology as HIMIPref™ but just sleeps for input number of seconds and returns an integer vector of the input length (in case anybody suspects that the volume of data is a contributory factor).
Full source code is available to HIMIPref™ clients.
Update: A note regarding the availability of this test has been added to the HIMIPref™ documentation, “System Requirements“.