Install & Run Multiple MT4 Terminals in Your VPS

You can now install and login to more than one MT4 account by installing multiple MT4 terminals in your Windows VPS. It can surely save you a lot of time and cost. It also helps to duplicate the trades you made between separate MT4 accounts thus allowing you to maximize your profit and minimize the loss among all accounts.

Installing Multiple MetaTrader Terminal

Sometimes, it can be a bit confusing on how to install multiple MT4 terminals in the same VPS. If you try to run the installer without specifying a new path, it will just overwrite the existing installation file.

Thus, it is crucial to choose a different location or path every time you install a new MT4 terminal. By default, MT4 installer sets the installation path to C:\Program Files\ Metatrader 4\. It is totally fine for the first installation. However, for the next installation, you need to change the location during set up by clicking on the ‘Settings’ button.

You may use another name to identify different MT4 terminals. For example, you can rename other installations as follows:

• C:\Program Files\Metatrader 4 no1\
• C:\Program Files\Metatrader 4 no2\
• C:\Program Files\Metatrader 4 no3\

Click ‘Next’ to proceed with the installation in the selected folder accordingly.

Finally, you can repeat the same steps to install multiple MT4 terminals in your VPS. Eventually, the folder containing all your installation files will look like this.

To run multiple MT4 at the same time, just open each MT4 folder, and double-click terminal.exe to start the program.

Optimizing Multiple MT4 Terminals in Your VPS

You might face some issue while running multiple instances of MT4 in your server. Most obviously, your MT4 will start to feel lag and eventually freeze despite your server resources is still sufficient.

There are several potential problems that can affect your MT4 performance, such as:

• Running multiple MT4 terminals on multi-core CPU VPS.
• Running too many MT4 terminals on the same server.
• Using too many third party indicators or Expert Advisors on the MT4 terminal.
• Server running third party software (anti-virus, firewall, Internet browsers, and other apps).
• Poor internet connection. Note that there can be several or even dozen servers/gateways in between your VPS and your broker’s server, thus some delay can occur during trading.
• Your MT4 app problem.

Commonly on most cases, it becomes an issue only when you are running more than one MT4 application on the same VPS with a multi-core CPU.

For your information, multi-core CPU on a VPS is virtual CPU, which means those CPU cores are not real physical CPUs. In technical terms, MT4 is a 32-bit software application, and this creates problems to perform efficiently on multi-core CPU machines such as Quad-core, Dual-core, etc.

You can check on how many CPU cores your server has by contacting your VPS provider or checking the ‘Task Manager’ on the server.

1. Open Task Manager on your server by right-click on the Taskbar or search Task Manager on your server search tab.
2. When the ‘Task Manager’ window loads up, you need to switch to the ‘Performance’ tab.
3. Right-click on the CPU area and choose ‘Change graph to’ to ‘Logical processors’. It will separate the CPU into several boxes which indicate your cores number.

Although this may seem like an issue, there is a way to overcome this issue and optimize your MT4 performance on a multi-core VPS.

Method 1: Running all MT4 terminals on single CPU core

1. Run your MT4 application
2. Open Task Manager, and go to the Details tab
3. Right-click on terminal.exe, and choose Set Affinity
4. Uncheck “All Processors” and select one CPU core only (e.g CPU 0)
5. Repeat steps 1 to 4 to the remaining MT4 applications

Depending on your MT4 configuration (including EA and other add on service), you should be able to run at least 3-5 terminals at the same time on 1 CPU core. However, we would recommend you look at the CPU load of your VPS server and keep it below 65% for optimum performance.

Method 2: Running each MT4 terminals on different CPU core

You can follow the same steps as previously. This time, instead of selecting single CPU core for all MT4 instances, you need to set each terminal.exe process to different CPU core.

For example:
Your VPS has 4x vCPU cores and you run 4x MT4 instances. Then all 4x MT4 instances should be set as follows:

• MT4 instance #1 should use CPU 0
• MT4 instance #2 should use CPU 1
• MT4 instance #3 should use CPU 2
• MT4 instance #4 should use CPU 3