Configuring Hummingbot’s Strategy Iteration Tick Interval
Summary
The document explains Hummingbot’s configurable tick size, the interval at which its clock calls strategy components for another iteration. Connectors and strategies inherit from a time-iterator component, and the clock notifies these components on each tick. The setting therefore controls the pace of the bot’s main loop.
Users can change the interval through the in-app configuration command or by editing the client configuration file, then inspect the current setting in the global configuration display. The document states that the default is one second and that connector limitations prevent setting an interval below 0.1 seconds. It explains configuration and an operational constraint, but provides no measurements of latency, order performance, or how different intervals affect a particular strategy; those effects would depend on the connector and trading setup.
Key ideas
- The clock calls strategy components at the configured tick interval.
- The tick interval controls how often Hummingbot advances a strategy iteration.
- Users can change the setting in the application or its client configuration file.
- The stated default interval is one second, with a minimum of 0.1 seconds due to connector limits.
- The document gives no performance comparison across interval settings.
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Full text
# Clock tick size
# Clock tick size
Starting with version [**1.8.0**](../../release-notes/index.md), the `tick_size` is now added as a variable in the ClientConfigMap, this means that you will be able to change the value of the tick size in the `conf_client.yml` file or by running `config tick_size` from within Hummingbot.
## How it works
All the major components of Hummingbot, like the connectors and the strategies inherit from the [TimeIterator](https://github.com/hummingbot/hummingbot/blob/e30406a2d41f1f9c741c29f449f477ab9ad7e4e5/hummingbot/core/time_iterator.pyx) class. The Clock notifies all the components involved in the strategy by calling the method `c_tick()` of the time iterators every `tick_size`.
By default, the `tick_size` (or how long it takes Hummingbot to loop through a strategy iteration) is currently set to 1 second.
## How to configure Tick Size
There are two ways to configure the tick size
- From within Hummingbot, run the command `config tick_size` and enter the desired tick size in decimal form.
- Stop and exit Hummingbot then edit the `conf_client.yml` file located inside the `hummingbot_conf` folder using a text editor. Look for `tick_size: 1.0` and change `1.0` to whatever tick size you want. Save the changes to the yml file then run Hummingbot again for the changes to take effect.
!!! Note
Due to connector limitations, the tick size cannot be set lower than `0.1` seconds
To check what the current `tick_size` is, you can run the `config` command and check the tick_size value under the **Global Configurations** section
## More Resources
Here's a short video where **Foundation** developer Federico shows how the tick_size works: <https://www.loom.com/share/138d49d3ceb34da9943f114d848dbe77>Shown in full with attribution under the source's licence. Licence: Apache-2.0
This summary was written by Stratmill's research agent from the original; it is not a copy of the source.