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What Is Packet Retransmission in MetaTrader?

Retransmission is the share of network packets that had to be sent again. Why it reads stability better than ping, and what a rising rate does to execution.

Packet retransmission is the share of network packets that had to be sent a second time because the first copy was lost or never acknowledged, expressed as a percentage. On a healthy connection it sits at zero. It measures whether the link between a MetaTrader terminal and the outside world is reliable — a different question from how fast it is, and a more useful one.

How it works

TCP, the protocol carrying everything between terminal and trade server, guarantees delivery by re-sending. The sender waits for an acknowledgement; if none arrives before a timeout, the packet goes out again.

Retransmission % = packets re-sent / packets sent × 100

MetaTrader exposes this as a terminal property, the Expert Advisor forwards it with the rest of the environment data, and ShowMyTrades formats it to two decimals — so anything below 0.005% displays as 0.00%.

Two properties matter when reading it. The value comes from the machine's own network stack rather than an isolated probe of one connection, so other software on the same VPS or home line contributes to it. And it is a rate, not an event count: any non-zero value means loss is ongoing, not a one-off.

Why it matters

Ping is an average, and averages describe the good case. A connection can post an excellent mean round trip and still drop packets, because loss lives in the tail that the average smooths away. Retransmission is the tail, measured directly.

The cost of a single retransmission is not one extra round trip. The sender has to wait out a timeout before deciding the packet is gone, and that wait is typically several times the normal round trip. So a 1% retransmission rate does not make everything 1% slower — it makes 1% of messages dramatically slower, while the other 99% look perfect. Every average you can compute stays reassuring.

TCP also delivers in order, so while a lost packet is recovered everything behind it waits. That is the familiar symptom: quotes stop, then arrive in a burst.

What a rising rate predicts is therefore concrete. Requotes on instant execution, because the price the terminal is working from is stale by the time the request lands. Wider realised slippage on market execution. Expert Advisor actions that fire late or not at all. And, if it keeps climbing, a dropped session and a terminal that stops sending data entirely.

It is also the earlier signal of the two. Ping degrades when the route changes; retransmission degrades when the link itself is failing, usually well before a disconnection.

What the data shows

The figures below describe accounts published on ShowMyTrades, not traders in general. Only MetaTrader accounts have a terminal to report on, and they are the overwhelming majority of the 10,000+ connected accounts. cTrader and TradeLocker accounts run through broker APIs with no terminal and no network readings of their own.

The reason it matters here is automation. The median autotrading share is 99%, and 53.9% of accounts are more than 90% automated. Those terminals run unattended, often on a rented server their owner has not logged into for weeks. A discretionary trader notices a stuttering connection within minutes; the screen is in front of them. An Expert Advisor on a degrading VPS at three in the morning notices nothing, and neither does anyone else, until the results come out wrong.

Those accounts reach 703 distinct broker servers, and the path to each one is different.

Where you see it on ShowMyTrades

Retransmission is the second of six tiles in the Terminal panel — Terminal & Open Charts on MT5, plain Terminal on MT4 — immediately after Ping, followed by Terminal build, Memory, Auto trading and DLL imports. The tile shows a percentage to two decimals, and its tooltip states the reading directly: close to 0% means a stable connection, while consistently higher values point to an unreliable network or a trade server that is far away.

Read it with the panel header, which carries a status badge — Connected, No trade server or Offline — and the age of the last reading; an account silent for 11 minutes is marked offline. Retransmission climbing while that timestamp falls behind is the sequence that precedes a terminal going quiet.

The panel is owner-only and lives on the account's dashboard page: terminal data, including the Expert Advisors running on open charts, is never published on public pages or in widgets. cTrader and TradeLocker accounts have no terminal, so no such panel.

Common misunderstandings

  • "0.00% means a perfect connection." It means below the display's two decimals at the last sync. It is a snapshot, and one clean reading does not describe the night.
  • "It is the broker's fault." It describes the network path and the machine at the near end of it. A busy VPS raises it with no help from the broker at all.
  • "If ping is low, retransmission does not matter." That combination is the specific case worth worrying about: a fast average hiding a fat tail.
  • "It only affects the data feed, not my orders." Quotes and orders travel the same TCP connection. Whatever stalls one stalls the other.

The terminal readings arrive with the same Expert Advisor you install when connecting an account — see how to verify your account.