My Main runs very slow when using HKN

[menes777]

I am relatively new to Multi-boxing, I have only been doing it for about 6 months. I first started out with Octopus which worked really well for what I wanted to do. Except for I have really wanted to do AoE spells from my main rather than having to switch windows and target manually. So I downloaded HKN, got all the scripts setup and was able to not only do the same things as Octopus I also was able to start firing off some AoE's in a pretty tight pattern. However, my main was dragging really badly. It seemed like I was getting single digit framerates everywhere I went (first thought it was Stormwind, but then Menethil Harbor was the same). When I would switch over to the Alt's, they were smooth as silk. I think it might have to do something with the affinity settings, but I haven't gotten a chance to play with it much. I wanted to see if anyone else had problems like this. Doing a quick search and a skim over the topics nothing seemed to pop out as similar.

My setup is

Pentium D 805 OC'ed to 3.4 Ghz
4 GB of RAM
Vista x64 SP1

I wouldn't think that HKN was much more resource intensive than Octopus and even if it were, I would think that the slowness would also affect the alts as well as the main. Which leads me to think I just need to tinker with the script settings. Any advice would be appreciated.

[Freddie]

This is a pretty unusual problem -- I can't remember anybody reporting it before. You might be right about affinity since the presence of HotkeyNet might change the way Windows schedules threads. I would try setting all your WoWs to run on all cores and see if that changes anything. HotkeyNet has an easy command for that:

<Hotkey F1>
   <SendLabel ...>
      <SetAffinity all>

[menes777]

Setting the Affinity to all did the trick. It's an awesome program.

[Freddie]

Terrific. Thanks for the kind words.

I'm glad you suggested the solution because I'm not sure it would have occurred to me. I learned something from this.

If you don't mind me asking -- I'm trying to learn everything I can from this -- were you doing anything to set affinity when the problem was happening? Or were the WoWs just running with their default affinities?

Also, do you have hyperthreading enabled? (Does TaskManager show two CPUs or four?)

[menes777]

The WoW's were running with their default affinities.

No HTing, just two logical CPU's. However I do OC them.

[Freddie]

In that case I don't understand why this helped because, by default, WoW sets its affinity to 0 and 1. And when you use <SetAffinity all> on your CPU without hyperthreading, HotkeyNet also sets WoW's affinity to 0 and 1. So nothing changed and yet peformance is different.

I'm stumped!