XP32 with 2Gigs of ram & 3 Wows running at 90% memory used - not quite snappy enough

[Blorton]

I'm on a recent Q6600 buildup, running with a 9800gtx-512 using keyclone's wonderful package to present all three sessions on a single 24" lcd. The machine is overclocked to 3GHz and that 2Gigs of memory is the good high speed stuff.

Each session has a unique cpu affinity set and runs from seperate wow copies. The third session runs from a second hard drive.

Sound is disabled for every instance and in general things work well with reasonable frame rates all around. I have each session limited for maxfps.

However, sometimes when I have to do a hairy pull in an instance, things tend to get sluggish and troubles arise.

I'm seeing in task manager that each session uses around 400megs of ram. That should be leaving "enough" for the OS, but I'm guessing the machine is starting to use the swap file. I have no other apps open when I'm doing this.

Can anyone confirm that going up to the 3.x Gigs of usable system memory is worth it in anything less than a 5-box situation? I ordinarily would just get the second memory kit and carry on, but this memory runs pretty warm.

Thanks,
Blorton

[chazz]

I ran four instances of WoW on my computer and had 90% usage or so, running Vista which wants about 800ish megs, when I had 2GB aswell.
Threw my old RAM out and bought 4GB new and faster ones and problem solved.
Though I had problem with affinity aswell so I can't really say if the memory caused any of the sluggishness, always good with more RAM though.
And since you're running KC aswell I advise you to check manually through Task Manager if your different instances really are using different cores, that was my problem, KC didn't work for me at all when it comes to CPU affinity so I now run HKN to adjust that before I log in.

[Blorton]

Thanks a bunch for the feedback! I may just see what I can find in a nice low latency 4G kit and go with that.

I'm running the G15 keyboard display applet that shows load on each cpu core as well as memory usage. Keyclone is definetely getting the affinity right in my case. (In fact, I had to take care of that early on when all sessions were on the default setting - the machine ran very poorly.)

[Blorton]

An update:

I went ahead and upgraded to 4Gigs of memory and the machine now runs three sessions very smoothly. I was clearly swapping in virtual memory before. I'd also tried stripping mods out on the second and third sessions, as well as turning their graphics down to minimums, but it simply took more memory to fix 'er up.

Unfortunately, my system is one of those that only sees 2.75Gigs regardless of tweaks, so I'm considering taking the 64-bit plunge.

Cheers.

[wowphreak]

umm check yer bios first and reduce the amount reserved for the graphics card.

vista64 wont increase yer performance.