Memory issue running 4 clients on one computer?

[Grogin]

Loading new zones places an enormous load on your hard drive and RAM. If you run out of RAM, you start swapping. On top of the normal hard drive load requirements. 7200 RPM hard drives have about 45 MB/sec constraints per single normal non raid, non solid state, non RAM drive. You eventually cap out hard drive bus bandwidth but for most modern motherboard Northbridges, that's not going to happen, even with 5 drives at ~250 total MB/sec. If so, get a 1x PCI-E card and you are set.

Anyway, when you load 1 WoW, it reads it at full blast with no swapping. Add 3 more that all need the data THEN add swapping? You will be lucky to get off the Zepp before it loads again. That ~45 MB limit is per drive and scales quite linearly with the number of drives. Add more RAM and consider adding an extra drive or two (they are cheap these days). You will see a huge improvement. Also consider cranking your settings down.

Thanks Xzin, after reading that I spoke to a guy here at work that hordes PC parts. Im going to try a NAS that he has with two drives on it and put a WOW directory on each. My new RAM will come in tomorrow and I'll slap that in as well.

Thanks so much for the help and insight. :thumbup:

[Chorizotarian]

The more clients you have per harddrive the more they will fight over harddrive access. If possible spread them out a bit.

The difference between 1 harddrive hosting 4 clients and each client folder having its own harddrive is huge.

This is probably right if you create 5 copies of WoW via Ctrl-V / Ctrl-C. If you symbolically link them though (Vista mklink, XP linkd) this doesn't seem to happen. I'm running them all off 1 disk, and I don't see any disk contention issues.

If anyone wants to try it out I can provide a PowerShell script that creates a new linked copy of WoW w/ 1 command.

[BobGnarly]

Question: Are you running all the WoW instances out of the same directory, or different ones?

If you aren't already, try running it all out of a single directory. I had a very similar problem running 5 instances in 2G (with zoning on zeps), and running it all out of the same directory made it (and the city lag) MUCH better. I'm guessing the hard drive cache is the reason, but whatever it is, it was night and day for me.

[Chorizotarian]

That would have the same effect as running them from 5 linked directories, except that you'll get collisions between the video settings, saved variables, etc. between the various instances. IMO symbolic linking is the way to go.

[wendalf]

Sorry to drudge up an old thread but I am just trying to optimize my systems performance. I currently run 4 instances of WoW on one box. I have 3.0GHz dual core, 4GB RAM, 9800GTX+. I currently run all 4 instances from 1 directory. I am going to do some testing but I wanted some suggestions first.

I have 2 SATA drives in the machine so would it be optimal to run 2 instances from their own directory per hard drive? I am going to mess around with different setups and see if I can tell a difference in performance.

I currently do not have any issues really except for first entering large cities, after about 15 seconds it clears up to the point of acting like I was running a single instance of the game.