Summary: A hidden performance drag in MT4 backtesting: visual objects (arrows, lines) accumulate on every tick and slow the tester. This guide shows how to manually delete them mid-run to restore speed and cut testing time.




I was running a multi-year backtest on a scalping EA a few weeks ago, and I hit a wall. The first year of data zipped by in maybe five minutes. The second year slowed to a crawl. By the time I got to year three, it was taking almost as long to process a single week as it had taken for the whole first year.

I did the usual things—turned off the chart update, closed unnecessary windows, even tweaked Windows power settings to "High Performance." None of it helped. I was about to abandon the test when I noticed something: the chart was absolutely littered with tiny arrows and entry/exit lines. Every single trade the EA made left a visual mark, and by year three, there were thousands of them.

The terminal was bogging down trying to redraw all those objects on every single tick. This isn't something you see in the official documentation—the MetaTrader tester is designed to show you what's happening, but there's no built-in toggle to turn off the object creation during the run . You either take the visualization or you don't.

My Workaround

Here's the trick that got my backtest moving again. It's manual, and it requires you to keep an eye on the tester window, but it works.

  • Start your backtest normally. Don't use "Visual mode" if you don't need it. If you do need visual mode, make sure the chart is visible.

  • Wait until you notice the test has slowed down. For me, it's usually after a few thousand trades or a couple of years of data.

  • Click on the chart inside the Strategy Tester window. Make it the active window.

  • Look for the small toolbar at the top-left of the chart. There's a button with a line and an "X" icon—it's the "Delete All Trend Lines" button. Next to it is usually a button to delete all objects (arrows, labels, etc.).

  • Click "Delete All Trend Lines," then click the button to delete all objects.


    • As soon as I do that, the tick counter starts flying again. The terminal stops trying to render thousands of lines and arrows on every incoming tick. It's not a permanent fix—the EA will keep drawing new arrows as it goes—but it clears the backlog and lets you finish the test in a fraction of the time.

    One thing to watch out for: if you're using the visual tester to confirm entry logic, this trick wipes the slate clean, so you lose the visual record of past trades. I only do this when I'm running a pure speed test for throughput (ticks per second) rather than verifying individual trade logic.

    Reference: Eabang forum discussion. "发现了加快回测速度的方法." eabang.com, 2025 .

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