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If a technical indicator works very slow, and I wish to include it in an EA ( using iCustom() ), is there a some "wrapper" that could cache the indicator results to a file based on the particular indicator inputs?

This way I could get a better speed next time when I backtest it using the same set of parameters, since the "wrapper" could read the result from file rather than recalculate the result from the indicator.

user3666197
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william007
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2 Answers2

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I heard that some developers did that for their needs in order to speed up backtesting, but as far as i know, there's no publicly available solution. If I had to solve this problem, I would create a class with two fields (datetime and indicator value, or N buffers of the indicator), and a collection class similar to CArrayObj.mqh but with an option to apply binary search, or to start looking for element from a specific index, not from the very beginning of the array.

Daniel Kniaz
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Recent MT4 Builds added VERY restrictive conditions for Indicators

In early years of MT4, this was not so cruel as it is these days.

FACT#1: fileIO is 10.000x ~ 100.000x slower than memIO:

This means, there is no benefit from "pre-caching" values to disk.

FACT#2: Processing Performance has HARD CEILING:

All, yes ALL, Custom Indicators, that are being used in MetaTrader4 Terminal ( be it directly in GUI, or indirectly, via Template(s) or called via iCustom() calls & in Strategy Tester via .tpl + iCustom() ) ALL THESE SHARE A SINGLE THREAD ...

FACT#3: Strategy Tester has the most demanding needs for speed:

Thus - eliminate all, indeed ALL, non-core indicators from tester.tpl template and save it as "blank", to avoid any part of such non-core processing.

Next, re-design the Custom Indicator, where possible, so as to avoid any CPU-ops & MEM-allocation(s), that are not necessary.

I remember a Custom Indicatore designs with indeed deep-convolutions, which could have been re-engineered so as to keep just a triangular sparse-matrix with necessary updates, that has increased the speed of Indicator processing more than 10.000x, so code-revision is the way.

So, rather run a separate MetaTrader4 Terminal, just for BackTesting, than having to wait for many hours just due to un-compressible nature of numerical processing under a traffic-jam congestion in the shared use of the CustomIndicator-solo-Thread that none scheduling could improve.

FACT#4: O/S can increase a process priority:

Having got to the Devil's zone, it is a common practice to spin-up the PRIO for the StrategyTester MT4, up to the "RealTime PRIO" in the O/S tools.

One may even additionally "lock" this MT4-process onto a certain CPU-core(s) and setup all other processes with adjacent CPU-core-AFFINITY, so that these two distinct groups of processes do not jump one to the other group's CPU-core(s). Hard, but if squeezing the performance to the bleeding edge, this is a must.

user3666197
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