By Martin Yerfo
Most active traders usually have more than one MetaTrader 4 terminal open at the time for different reasons, either have multiple accounts, demo trading in several brokers, comparing strategies, etc.
But the limiting factor to how many Metatraders you can run on a computer is based on the CPU speed and available memory. This can be a big problem when running MetaTrader on a VPS where you have to pay more if you need more resources like memory, speed or space.
Here are a few simple configuration changes you can make to reduce MetaTrader’s memory footprint.
=> The most important change is to open the option screen by pressing CTL + O, go to the Charts Tab and reduce the “Max bars in history” and “Max bars in chart” to 5000, this will limit how many bars are displayed on the chart and in the history making this installation unsuitable for back testing but it will use less memory on live or demo trading.
=> Also disable every feature you do not use on the Email, Publisher and Events Tabs.
=> Disable the News on the Server Tab
=> Close all charts that you are not using, each chart uses memory.
=> Open Market Watch (CTL + M) > right click and Hide All, deleting all pairs that are not in use
=> Remove any Indicator you do not need.
=> On expert Advisors if possible disable logging, the less you write to the Hard Drive, the faster your MetaTrader will run on a VPS.
=> Restart your MetaTrader so the changes will take effect
=> restart MetaTrader regularly to maintain memory usage low, MetaTrader keeps all the history data for the opened charts in RAM and only writes it to disk into the History folder when MetaTrader closes.
=> You should also reboot you machine often and exit any programs that you are not using, on a VPS machine you could also disable many services that you do not need.
About the Author
Full time Metatrader developer, programer, forex trader and marketing director
Professional http://4xtrader.net/forex-tools/ and http://4xtrader.net
