Which gives better performance?

[Tybudd]

I dual box with only 2 toons, on 1 cpu. so at all times I'm using 1 monitor, and I control the slave toon using keyclone.


My question is would it be better (performance wise) for me to either:
1. Load WOW up from only 1 directory, and load up both my accounts from that 1 directory.
2. Load 2 directories of wow, so each of my accounts will have their own directory to load from.


in which area does it cause less stress on my system if any, and in doing either, does my fps raise some or not?

[Aethon]

I've never had any issues with 1 folder. Now, I have recently created a second WoW folder so I can have addons loaded on my main that aren't loaded on my alts (In retrospect, I realize I could have just disabled for the individual accounts)

[Tybudd]

Yeah mines is insane, running an instance alone in a regular area, my fps is at 95-110 no problem, and in shatt 60-75 FPS, so you would think that my system is great, but when I'm running both wow's, my fps drop all the way down to 10-15fps and at times spikes up to 25fps, horrible.

[Tybudd]

/bump

Help please

[wowphreak]

The only reason to have multiple folders is so yeh can have different config setting for each account.

[sqeaky4100]

The only reason to have multiple folders is so yeh can have different config setting for each account.That.

best performance would be to buy a $75 320gb hardrive and add that. Then install your main account ( with the high settings ) on one hard drive. And the others on the new one.

[Wide]

So...

I'm 5boxing using 1 installation, would it be wise to move all my slaves to a second wow installation on another HD? (I'm already using the "lower-graphic-detail" macro)

[Aethon]

Only if you need it. I'm running 5 from a laptop, decent specs (not the best of the best) I have the 4 alts on 1024x768 and the main on 1280x1024. All the graphics are turned to the lowest settings (I've been everywhere before, I don't need to see it rendered in the highest quality again) and of course, all windowed.

I might throw an external monitor on it and move the alts to there, but it'll still all be on the same graphics processor.

[Otlecs]

1. Load WOW up from only 1 directory, and load up both my accounts from that 1 directory.
2. Load 2 directories of wow, so each of my accounts will have their own directory to load from.
All else being equal (and it's often not...), loading from one directory will almost certainly be faster than loading from two, because the disk cache will be used more effectively.

in which area does it cause less stress on my system if any, and in doing either, does my fps raise some or not?
You may get fewer physical I/Os, and that will raise your framerate when WoW's doing some background loading of textures, etc. *shrug*.

Given the nature of your question, I'm assuming that you've already diagnosed your performance bottleneck as being disk I/O rather than any of the myriad of other possible causes.

Is that a safe assumption?

[wetstreet]

Depending on your computer skills, you can try something like the Mac hybrid approach. The basic idea is to create a new directory for each WoW instance, but link to the original data files. This gives you a way to configure each client differently but still keep the efficient memory usage and disk caching.

If you have no idea what I just said then I suggest you ignore me.

[wowphreak]

errmm if yeh got performance issues, looking at hard drives to increaseit, is not the way. Yer barking up the wrong tree?

[Jamien]

Your graphics card will be taking the biggest hit trying to load 2 games at once.
I found moving my slaves onto a separate drive, and forcing them to use CPU1 while my main uses CPU0 increased performance a bit.

But realistically speaking, loading one wow is relatively simple, but loading two or more at the same time requires a lot of processing power.
Having 5, I use keyclone to restrict the slaves to max 15 fps when they aren't in focus and 55 max when they are, I can get about 75fps on my main with all mods (200+ mods ... >_>) running around ashenvale or such. As soon as I get in Org (flying) all 5 will lag for about 10 seconds when they start their flight into org then stop lagging once or twice during the landing sequence. Normally they lag out then load landed.
If you wanted to stop that your best bet is to drop all your grapics down to lowest, remove as many mods as possible and have as little eye candy as possible.
Short of putting some cards in SLI / Crossfire.

[Otlecs]

Your graphics card will be taking the biggest hit trying to load 2 games at once.
I have to disagree with this :) The biggest hit at load-time is indeed the disk I/O.

Short of putting some cards in SLI / Crossfire
Which would, unfortunately, have no positive impact on WoW.

I hope the original poster has the decency to come back and let us know how/if he fixed his problem, so that future visitors to this thread with a similar problem can see what the issue was.

[Jamien]

Doesn't wow make use of SLI/crossfire?

and yes, load time is disk I/O, but also a graphics issue.

[SuS]

If your running Windows XP thats the source of your FPS problems as for one folder or two? thats somthing that either one of the many Sticky thread's or a quick 'Search' would net great results. :S

[Otlecs]

Doesn't wow make use of SLI/crossfire?
I shall defer to the many here who know the detailed answer to this question better than I, but I've read alot of threads here suggesting this to be the case. Many threads suggest that SLI/Crossfire actually degrades WoW's framerate.


and yes, load time is disk I/O, but also a graphics issue.
We've obviously had different experience here :)

I've never seen any of the GPUs under any serious strain from WoW, even on a VAIO VGA-AR31S noteboook. I have however seen lots of performance problems when zoning / moving around a populated city as textures, etc, are loaded in the background.

[Jamien]

I've never seen any of the GPUs under any serious strain from WoW, even on a VAIO VGA-AR31S noteboook. I have however seen lots of performance problems when zoning / moving around a populated city as textures, etc, are loaded in the background.hmmmmmmm
Maybe I need to look at some raptor drives ;)

[Memn]

I dual box with only 2 toons, on 1 cpu. so at all times I'm using 1 monitor, and I control the slave toon using keyclone.


My question is would it be better (performance wise) for me to either:
1. Load WOW up from only 1 directory, and load up both my accounts from that 1 directory.
2. Load 2 directories of wow, so each of my accounts will have their own directory to load from.


in which area does it cause less stress on my system if any, and in doing either, does my fps raise some or not?

Neither of these two options will have a large impact on your FPS. Option #1 will result in faster load times than 2, especially if your system is tight on memory, as you'll get more benefit from disk caching.

Two common causes for FPS problems for multiboxers:

1. Using a Dual View configuration with an Nvidia card on XP.
Symptoms: System runs fast with one client, running on one full screen, but when adding a second, both are considerably, and consistently slower. For example, 80 fps when one boxing, but 10 fps when multiboxing.
Solution: Configure the displays to use Horizontal Span rather than Dual View & configure Wow to use windowed mode rather than full screen mode. OR Upgrade to Vista.

2. Memory Starvation
Symptoms: System runs fine most of the time, but "shutters" after prolongued sessions, or when entering busy zones (Shatt, Orgrimmar, Stormwind, Undercity) and performance is not uniform across windows when this occurs. High Disk IO observed during this time.
Solution: Add more RAM. The disk IO can mislead you into thinking you need to adjust your storage solution, but what is happening is your system is running out of memory, and trying to temporarily use disk to store that information. Crappy RAM is still MUCH faster than the fastest Disk, so optimizing your disk IO will not resolve this situation. Figure out how much memory a single instance of Wow consumes on your box in a busy area, and multiply that number by the number of clients you want to run and add another gigabyte for good measure. That should be around how much memory you need. My system uses about 700MB per instance when I'm in Shatt, I'm running with 6GB and I run 6 clients great from one folder on 64bit Vista.

I have first hand experience with both of these. I also tried running from multiple folders, but my load times were considerably faster using a single folder, even when using multiple drives for multiple folders.

[Memn]

I've never seen any of the GPUs under any serious strain from WoW, even on a VAIO VGA-AR31S noteboook. I have however seen lots of performance problems when zoning / moving around a populated city as textures, etc, are loaded in the background.hmmmmmmm
Maybe I need to look at some raptor drives ;)
This is likely a RAM starvation, not a drive speed issue. A 5400 RPM is fast enough to service the IO required to load the textures used in Wow, interraction with the pagefile that is most likely causing this. If your experiencing this, max out your Ram before buying a 10k hard disk.

[Otlecs]

This is likely a RAM starvation, not a drive speed issue. A 5400 RPM is fast enough to service the IO required to load the textures used in Wow, interraction with the pagefile that is most likely causing this. If your experiencing this, max out your Ram before buying a 10k hard disk.
Thanks for the advice. I really don't see any evidence that my problem is memory-related though.

I have 4GB RAM, and never see utilisation go above ~70% when boxing. I don't remember my observed figures for page fault rates, but it was negligible even when I was seeing all that thrashing of drone disks.

8GB would perhaps be nice, but the 2GB sticks are slower than the 1GB sticks I currently have, which makes them an unattractive proposition.

The disks hosting the drones (which are not the same stripeset as hosts the pagefile) thrash when I enter an area with lots of other players (loading all those snazzy armour textures, I suspect).

So I'm as certain as I can be that my specific problem is related to disk I/O.

I've read threads here (from people who have analysed it in far greater detail than I) that suggest the problem is that WoW likes to load a large number of small files, so seek times are often more important than transfer rates.

My twin Velociraptors are on order (though not dispatched yet... so much for a weekend of experimentation!) so I'll be able to prove / disprove my bottleneck theory Real Soon Now(tm) :)

[Memn]

Otlecs,

70% Memory utilization is too high. Windows isn't reporting only physical memory usage, even though it leads you to believe it is. Page Faults are not the same as Page File Hits. (A Page Fault is a memory access error, its a completely different thing). When you have enough ram, and wow is not causing page file hits, it hardly uses any hard disk except when you are loading, or entering a new zone.

I was running 4 GB, with a 768MB Video card (so really only 3.25 GB) and it wasn't enough memory for me. I could tell because I couldn't run around Shatt without losing straggling clones due to freezing long enough to fall out of follow distance. Different disk setups had little to no impact. Adding 2gb of ram and upgrading to Vista 64bit enabled me to do loops around Shattrah full speed with no stragglers during primetime on friday night. Its night and day.

[Memn]

If you want to measure how much of your paging file you are using, goto Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Performance and add a counter for "Paging File > % Usage > _Total" keep performance monitor up while you run around Shatt for a little bit. If this counter does not stay nice and low, and jumps erratically, you can benefit from ram upgrade.

[Otlecs]

loading, or entering a new zone.
Which is exactly what I'm seeing - losing followers when initially entering a zone that's heavily populated by players wearing a varity of armour and weapons.

We're in danger of descending into "teaching each other to suck eggs" territory, so I'll bow out of this after this post, but rest assured that I know a thing or two about measuring performance (including physical memory usage) on a wide range of platforms and I would bet good beer money on my specific problem being I/O related :)

I don't recognise your description of a page fault as a "memory access error" other than in the very broadest sense. It's (typically) an application attempting to access a page (or pagelet) of memory that's been stuffed onto disk for the time being. That often causes a "hard" page fault, which is a hit on the page file.

I wonder if you're getting confused with protection faults?

No matter. I'll be sure to post back with my results once I have them, though I am encouraged by the SSD results (http://www.dual-boxing.com/forums/index.php?page=Thread&threadID=12529), which also conclude that I/O was the bottleneck in his particular configuration.

As an aside, the machine in question is a liquid cooled Vista64 box with 2x1GB video cards (no, I don't just play WoW!) a 3.67Ghz quad core 9650 and two striped arrays of disks - one matched, one mis-matched... to be fixed by the Raptors!. The memory is 1333MHz DDR3... still not a bad rig even now it's a few months old.

[Memn]

We're in danger of descending into "teaching each other to suck eggs" territory
Yeah, I think we are both troubleshooting different symptoms. The OP was mostly concerned about his FPS I think, and I wasn't realizing that you were really talking about optimizing load time. I was talking about reducing "shudder"... I blame the OP for not being more specific about his symptoms ;-)

[-silencer-]

A 5400 RPM is fast enough to service the IO required to load the textures used in Wow, interraction with the pagefile that is most likely causing this. If your experiencing this, max out your Ram before buying a 10k hard disk.
On a busy server while flying into Shatt, I can guarantee a 5400rpm drive isn't enough to handle loading all the data needed for 5-boxing WoW. While using separate installs, before I symlinked to the /Data directory on my Raptors, I would occasionally have one of my instances of WoW crash due to a "Failed to read data" error from my 7200rpm drive. There were too many small I/O requests to keep up with the game, and it would crash since some I/O requests weren't being finished within a reasonable amount of time. This error never occurred after I symlinked the /Data directory to my RAID0 Raptors, but I'd still lag like crazy while flying into Shatt, and many players/objects/textures wouldn't show up for up to 20-30 seconds after landing. *All* of these problems went away after symlinking to a /Data directory on my SSD.

These were the primary links that convinced me to try out an OCZ Core SSD for WoW:
http://www.guru3d.com/article/ocz-core-sata-64gb-solid-state-drive-review/8
http://www.overclock3d.net/reviews.php?/storage/ocz_ssd_64gb_core_series_solid_state_disk/1
http://www.bluefi.co.uk/

[Memn]

I dunno how to account for it, but I'm seeing ALOT less disk access on my system that your describing. I installed multiple drives expecting to configure them for optimal disk IO but am having very little disk IO (other than when loading) with a single install on a single 7200k SATA drive. For my usage patterns, I would think a slower drive would only impact my loading screen duration. I saw ALOT more disk IO before my memory upgrade, which is the only reason I keep bringing that up.

[Memn]

Otlecs, - Silencer -,

How much ram are you guys running with?

As I've said previously, upgrading from 3.25GB to 6GB was a huge performance increase for me, and a drastic reduction in Disk IO. I am typically using 4.5GB while 5 boxing.