Forex MegaDroid Kills the Competition – Literally!

Our adventures in MetaTrader land with the Forex MegaDroid took a sinister turn last night.  The robot didn't make any trades but it wasn't completely idle.  First it lost its memory, then it killed another robot. Maybe it was jealous and decided to stop a competitor from profiting whilst it could not? Maybe it just went totally out of its mega-mind?

I checked the UK VPS we use for live account testing first thing this morning, to discover that one of the copies of MetaTrader 4 that had been happily running an expert advisor last night, and which unlike the Droid had been making money too, had disappeared from the screen.  Further investigation revealed the culprit.  It was the Droid that did it!  Take a look at this screenshot:

You can see that after its exploits yesterday the expert advisor made no trades overnight. You can also see a couple of error messages in the expert log which show that when it asked the server for some memory in the small hours of the morning, there was none to be found. The task manager window shows that one copy of terminal.exe (as the MetaTrader 4 client terminal calls itself) was trying to consume more than its fair share of that memory. You'll have to take my word for it that when I clicked the "End Process" button it was the Droid that disappeared, not one of the other robots we are testing. One of those did vanish in the middle of the night though. Another question that as yet remains unanswered is why that copy of MetaTrader closed down, when presumably it too couldn't find any extra memory in its hour of need.

You have been warned.  It looks as though the MegaDroid has a memory leak. A particularly pernicious kind of bug. Do not let it share a computer with any other copies of MetaTrader without keeping a very close watch on it. It might kill one of your favourite robots too.