MT4 and Computer Performance

Perhaps someone can help me to sort out what my problem could be with the performance of MT4 on my new trading computer. My computer is only a few months old. It is a custom built quad core, 4 gig ram, windows xp pro 64, multiple video cards, etc. It is dedicated to trading and nothing else. So what happens is that I load up in the morning and everything is performing normally. My desktop will consist of EUR/USD, GBP/USD, USD/JPY each with 5M,15M, and daily timeframes. So then perhaps a couple of hours later when I try to scale the charts, or work with any drop down menus it seems to take forever. Everything is in slow motion. So I shut down the program and restart it and everything is fine for awhile until the same thing happens. Now the crazy thing is I have MT4 on a ratty old celeron HP Laptop and it never seems to happen on that computer. In fact I leave that computer on all the time with the MT4 running and the performance never seems to deteriorate. I have checked my system processes and can see that MT4 will spike the cpu load to 25% quite frequently which seems quite high to me. I am sure hoping that someone has some ideas on this cause it has me baffled. Any assistance will be greatly appreciated.

Obvious bump, but where are the nerds and geeks when you really need one. Just kidding!

I am still trying to figure this issue out. I noticed that the MT4 files are in the (x86) Program Folder on the computer. Would this be and issue?

you didnt say the ghz. but could be the anti-virus slowing the symbol info. try hiding symbols you dont need. prob something slowing it - look in task manager for other running programs. - next try uninstall/reinstall

try the easy stuff first.

could be a poorly written indicator or two also. Those can cause a major draw on computer resources.

Hi YM

with a machine spec like yours that should really not be happening. damn frustrating I'll bet.

Are you familiar with using Task Mangager.

After boot up .. right click on explorer process and End Process Tree... then start new application in Task Manager ... might be useful to put a shortcut to your MT install on the desktop first ... then navigate to that rather than through your c: file structure... and start MT4 as the only non essential app running on the PC. You can right click on the terminal process and set its priority higher too, but this wont id the problem.

do you have custom indys running in your mt windows ??. if so gradually add them and check machines performance.

As I said your machine spec should be flying thru MT.... if you are not running any bespoke indies you should be able to run many ... many ... many price charts with standard indies with no problems at all.

Is your broadband ok... presumably if your laptops ok.


Let us know how your getting on mate ..... I feel for you I really do...

Are you using full history files? This can eat up the CPU resources to a huge amount. If you use full history for backtesting, you should reserve an instance of MT4 just for testing purposes (copy the whole folder and just use that one for the tests, with max bars in chart and history) and the normal one for daily trading, with a much smaller setting for max bars (Menu Tools - Options - Charts).

If not, try reducing those numbers anyway (standard is 512000 bars in history and 60000 bars in chart, you can try a lower number and see if this improves your computer's performance).

I just wanted to bump this as I am having real issues with MT4 performance. I am using custom indicators but checking with others using similar they do not seem to have same issues. I have Win 7 Intel Core i7-2600 [email protected] and 8GB RAM. I have just tried educing number of bars in charts and history down to 5000. This has had some improvement but its still slow. I am missing trades because of it. Anyone got any bright ideas?

I found this elsewhere which has helped a bit I think

My MT4 platform was 'sputtering' all the time, little freezes for a few seconds at a time (with hourglass mouse) that i would just have to wait out. I only had 8 charts open and a few simple indicators on each chart. I did some research this weekend and put together a list of some things that helped streamline Windows (XP) for me. Feel free to add to the list if you have a quality tip. Hope this helps.

Before i get into it the Windows tweaks let me say that there are a few things you can do within MT4 as well, notably:

- limiting the number of bars/chart (see Tools/Options/Charts)
- limiting the number of overall bars (same)
-CTRL-M to bring up Market Watch, right-click, select 'Hide All' (my broker says this is very important for saving bandwidth)
-Check your 'Experts' tab in the Terminal and look for any kind of 'errors'

Credit to Djarum11 for this