What to do when MT4 is using a lot of memory?

Hi,

My VPS is showing 75% memory using and seem to have been rising.

I am running 5 instances of MT4 with 8 charts each (40 charts total)

What is taking up most of the memory?

Would adjusting bars in chart and bars in history to 5000 reduce memory usage?

Or what else can I do about it?

I have a script that uses M1 data for all 23 major pairs my broker offers. The memory "hit" for this script is around 1 GB when my "Max Bars in chart" setting is 500000 (It loads 500000 M1 records x 23 pairs into memory).

When I reduce to "Max Bars in chart" setting to 5000, the memory "hit" is about 25 MB (It loads 5000 M1 records x 23 pairs into memory).

This is an extreme example, but, yes, reducing the "Max Bars in chart" value can have a dramatic effect on memory usage in MT4.

Even with no indicators and no scripts/EAs running, reducing the "Max Bars in chart" value does make a difference.

Depending on the strategy, you may or may not need the "Max Bars in chart" setting to be set at a very high value. The best option is to figure out how much historic data you need for your strategy and set the value accordingly, especially if you use the lower TF data (like M1).

Thanks for the input!

I will give that a try.

I am using M30 and only need the most recent number of days chart data for my EA to work with.

But of course... the longer I leave all my MT4 online on my VPS, the more the memory usage adds up over the days if I use defaults settings.

Just want to make sure I don't want to start getting cumulative reduced performance as that happens.

I've had this happen to me - and shortly after the motherboard burnt out (don't know if this was related or a coincidence) - you may well have a corrupt file and will need to do a re-install. I would suggest watching the TM as you open each Metatrader and see if you can identify the culprit.

Just wondering, I have no custom indicators,

I would like to keep my max bars for chart and history the same as it is now and also the number of charts (20) the same, more than half of them are for analysis...

What would speed up MT4 more?

Increasing my 8GB DDR3 RAM; or upgrading CPU i7 3.4GHz and mobo?

Any ideas?

Thanks
lnl

Thank you so much for the quick fix! I had forgotten that I had changed that setting while doing some backtesting a month ago. I went from well over a Gig of ram used down to just twenty megs!

Just a thought for those of you who want to backtest often but also dont want to have all that memory taken up all the time. Just install MT4 again but choose a different directory. My MT4 installation was in program files in the Metatrader 4 folder. Just run the installer again and when it asks you to choose the directory just add something to the end like a "-1) so it looks like this "Metatrader 4-1". This way you can have two icons on your desktop, one with MT4 running with the default amount of candles and one for backtesting with the candle amount increased. Now you only have to use all that ram when you are backtesting and can just close out that MT4 when you are not using it.

May the trend be with you....