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Speeding Up The MT4 Platform: Reduce Price Bars

Reducing the number of price bars, deleting log files, and removing the history file can help speed up the MT4 trading platform. Under the Tools > Options menu, the "Max bars in history" and "Max bars in chart" can be reduced to 5000. Log files accumulate over time and take up space, so the logs folders under Files > Open Data Folder should be emptied. Deleting the history file folder, which contains accumulated historical data, forces the platform to rebuild this file from the broker's server, reducing file size and improving speed. Restarting the platform after making these changes results in a marked speed improvement.

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Dragan Babic
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324 views4 pages

Speeding Up The MT4 Platform: Reduce Price Bars

Reducing the number of price bars, deleting log files, and removing the history file can help speed up the MT4 trading platform. Under the Tools > Options menu, the "Max bars in history" and "Max bars in chart" can be reduced to 5000. Log files accumulate over time and take up space, so the logs folders under Files > Open Data Folder should be emptied. Deleting the history file folder, which contains accumulated historical data, forces the platform to rebuild this file from the broker's server, reducing file size and improving speed. Restarting the platform after making these changes results in a marked speed improvement.

Uploaded by

Dragan Babic
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Speeding Up the MT4 Platform

By Clark Whitney October 9, 2018


A number of steps can be taken to speed up the MT4 platform I will show you three ways to do this.
Reduce Price Bars: There are two major needs for price bars in your trading platform, which is "bars in history"
and "bars in charts". The bars in history is required for back testing purposes. When your platform downloads
tick data, they are stored in the history folder in your hard disk. The "bars in chart" are the candles on your
chart in the form of price you trade with. The chart can only take a bearable number of bars depending on
your system resources. A high number of bars would need a high number of resources to handle object
painting on the screen, calculations, drawing, and execution of other tasks in nano or mini seconds.

Under the Tools > Options click on the charts tab and change the “Max bars in history” and “Max bars in chart”
to 5000.

Delete Logs Files: Log files are written records of all trading activity in MetaTrader. Whenever a trader
submits an order, modifies a stop loss or connects to the broker, MetaTrader notes everything that
happens along with the time. Unfortunately these files can accumulate over time and take up a lot of
space as well as slow down the platform.

Under Files > Open Data Folder you will see a logs folder. Double click on it to open it.
There will be lots of log files in this folder. In this case there are 78 of them. Press Control+A to select all of
them and click delete to get rid of them.

If your platform is running you will get a dialog box such as this:

That is OK as this file is being written to. Click on cancel then click on the back arrow to get back to the Data
Folder list.

Double click on the MT4 folder and you will find another logs folder. Double click on it to get to the contents.
Press Control+A to select all of them and click delete to get rid of them.

Again you may get a dialog box indicating that a file is active and can’t be deleted. That is OK, just click on
cancel.

Click the back arrow twice to get back to the Data Folder contents.

Delete History File: There is one more step and that is to delete the history file. This file contains data
accumulated over time for all time frames and all currency pairs being followed. After the terminal has been
shut down, all accumulated historical data will be stored in the "History Center". Sizes of files
containing historical quotes do not exceed values defined in settings. If the amount of historical data
accumulated exceeds the value set in the field of " Max. bars in history:", the oldest bars will be
deleted when storing. For each timeframe, a separate history file is formed named as SSSSSSPP.hst
(where SSSSSS - symbol name, PP - timeframe in minutes) and saved in the /HISTORY. Later on,
the saved data will be used to draw charts, as well as for testing trading strategies. Once this file is
deleted, it will be rebuilt from data on the broker’s server when the platform is restarted.

Double click the history folder to get to the contents.

Highlight the folder which includes the broker name – demo. In this case ATCBroker-Demo. Click delete to
eliminate this folder.

The last step is to close the Data Folder and restart the platform. You should see a marked speed
improvement of startup and operation.

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