The onTick method is called on a tick unless the tick occurred more than 1 second ago or it is not among the last 3 ticks for the particular instrument. The last tick for each instrument always "survives", with an exception if it occurred during the execution of IOrder.waitForUpdate. An IStrategy instance occupies a single thread, which means that a tick can be "skipped" (following the aforementioned policy) during any IStrategy thread's method call - for instance an onBar method call.

Example

Consider an example where every fourth tick sleeps for 2 seconds.

We have 4 subsequent ticks:

tick1 (08:16:05 797)
tick2 (08:16:06 798) 
tick3 (08:16:07 378) 
tick4 (08:16:07 926) 

The onTick execution sequence is the following:

onTick tick1 (08:16:05 797), current time: 08:16:05 840
onTick tick1 slept for 2 seconds
onTick tick2 (08:16:06 798), current time: 08:16:07 841  (tick2 survived because currentTime - tickTime < 1 sec)
onTick tick3 (08:16:07 378), current time: 08:16:07 841  (tick3 survived because currentTime - tickTime < 1 sec)
onTick tick4 (08:16:07 926), current time: 08:16:08 039  (tick4 happened already after the onTick execution of tick4)

Consider 4 more ticks later on:

tick5 (08:16:23 858) 
tick6 (08:16:24 407) 
tick7 (08:16:24 961) 
tick8 (08:16:25 837)

The onTick execution sequence is the following:

onTick tick5 (08:16:23 858), current time: 08:16:24 119
onTick tick5 slept for 2 seconds
onTick tick8 (08:16:25 837), current time: 08:16:26 119 (tick6 and tick7 got skipped because for both currentTime - tickTime > 1 sec)

OnTickExecutionPolicy.java