Introduction:
MetaTrader 4, which is also known as MT4, is an ETP (Electronic Trading Platform) widely used by online retail foreign exchange speculative traders. It was released in the year 2005 and founded by MetaQuotes Software This software is licensed to the foreign exchange brokers who provide this software to their clients. Below we’ll discuss why it is better to run MetaTrader 4 on 1 core than running it on multiple cores.
Why running MetaTrader 4 on 1 Core is better than on Multiple Cores?
In this blog post we’ll discuss how to improve the performance of MT4 and reduce the delays of your Expert Advisors and indicators. There are probably lots of people out there who are experiencing slow performance with their MetaTrader 4 software applications when running automated EA and trade copier software on their VPS or PC. For instance experiencing trade copier delay about 10 to 60 seconds when copying trades is not acceptable. The problem occurs because of MT4 platform when it runs on CPU machine with multi-cores. A trade copier software generally synchs trades every 400ms, which is two times a second, and one can also adjust the synchronization rate in order to improve the speed and performance both.
The problem will not occur if you are running a single MT4 instance or running multiple instances of MT4 on the same VPS server that has only one CPU core. In technical terms, the problem is that MT4 is a 32-bit software application and this creates trouble to perform efficiently on multi-core CPU machine such as Quad-core and Dual-core etc. In most of the cases, it seems to be an issue only when you are supposed to run more than one MT4 applications on the same VPS server with multi-core CPU. The multi-core CPU on a VPS server is a virtual CPU, which means those CPU cores are also not real physical CPU’s. They simulate virtual CPU cores to process MT4 applications. This trick will solve the problem if your MT4 application is running slowly or you might even be able to process more than one MT4 on the same VPS server. There are two options to improve your MT4 application’s performance:
- In this trick, you need to set all terminal.exe processes to use the same CPU core. It is independent of CPU core you are going to choose. But it important that you assign all MT4 processes to the same CPU core. This will put all the MT4 processes load on a single CPU core and the Task Manager will display 100% load on this CPU. Do not worry as these are virtual cores that are running on the same physical processor at your hosting provider’s server. So all the work will be done by one physical CPU and the MT4 application will not need to switch among multiple CPU cores and thus perform faster as well.
- In this trick, you need to assign each terminal.exe processes to use different CPU core. If you have more MT4 applications than CPU cores then you should close the rest of MT4 instances.
Checklist for speed troubleshooting:
- After each trade is copied there will be a log message generated in the ‘Experts’ tab which provides the exact delay in ms. In this was you will able to know if the delay is coming from the network connection.
- You can check if ‘Server Send’ and ‘Server Read’ counters are growing randomly or steadily. If any of these counters grows randomly, and with delays, it means your PC is slowing down the trade copier application.
- Check if your VPS server has multiple CPU cores or just a single CPU core. If you have only one CPU then try closing other applications and remove other Eas and indicators from your MT4 application to make it work even faster.
- If your VPS server has multiple CPU cores then you can choose any one option from the above explained tricks. Either set all the terminal.exe processes to use same CPU core or assign each terminal.exe processes to use different CPU cores.
Conclusion:
This is all about MT4 software application and why the performance of your MT4 applications goes slow. If your MT4 application is running slowly and your VPS server provider tells you that everything is working fine on their end then you must check if your VPS is a multi-core CPU machine. I hope that this article will help you to explore the reason of your slow MT4 problem and tricks will help you to fix this issue. These are the reason TradingFXVPS.com adopted the 1 Core policy to guarantee best trading performance and experience for our traders.
Sincerely,
Research Team
References from author: Rimantas Petrauskas