Any tricky ways to handle Dalaran x5?

[Hachoo]

Ok so heres the deal. 5 boxing for me works fine everywhere but Dalaran. I get >30FPS on my main window 100% of the time, my RAM is never fully used, etc. When I enter Dalaran, however, the memory usage of EACH WoW window that is inside Dalaran doubles (literally - my Main window will go from using 320MB to 640MB, etc).

This causes massive swapping which means I can't even enter Dalaran with all 5 accounts. Honestly, if I leave say my 4 clones in Conquest hold and then fly to Dalaran with JUST my main account, I still get <10FPS on my main account while shes in Dalaran.

Has anyone found any good tricks to temporarily solve this problem long enough to get an entire team into Dalaran? Are there any options to completely degrade video quality (say on my clones) and/or number of objects shown for a short period of time to run through there?

Suggesting I upgrade my PC is not an option - I already have a good video card (9800GT), my CPU is already overclocked, and upgrading CPU to more cores and/or upgrading memory would require either a new motherboard, new memory, and/or a new OS which is just way out of my price range right now.

Just curious if anyone had found any tricks or found any way to make Dalaran x 5 manageable at all at this point. Thanks in advance!

[pengwynman]

try disabling addons. there are some (like questhelper) that cause problems when logging into dalaran. i get about 10-20 fps on my main when i go into dalaran with all 5. it's a pain.

[SlayerX]

You could try the following:
Add another hard drive to your computer and throw 2-3 of ur wow there. I added 2 hard drives and spread out my wows (main has one instance, each new drive has 2 for 5 total)

For me this changed how fast things would load when I walked around and improved performance. it cuts down on 5 wows and whatever else is thrashing the drive so much.

Again this works for me, not saying for everyone.

Also, disable extra addons or disable them if your planning to go to dalaran (annoying i know), it should help it some.

Other then that, you could do 2 at a time or something, more time wasting I know, but alot better then crawling around for an hr just to use the bank. Also make sure shadows and other video stuff is off and down. Clip plane etc.

[zanthor]

I upgraded from 4gb to 8gb running Vista64 and dalaran became quite tolerable. The only bottleneck I'm seeing now is my CPU which is a 2.3ghz phenom quad core (with tlb erratta).

[pengwynman]

i dobut this will help but it could nevr hurt.

Add another hard drive to your computer and throw 2-3 of ur wow there. I added 2 hard drives and spread out my wows (main has one instance, each new drive has 2 for 5 total)

For me this changed how fast things would load when I walked around and improved performance. it cuts down on 5 wows and whatever else is thrashing the drive so much.

Again this works for me, not saying for everyone.ok, not really necessary to actually add another hard drive, but that does bring up the question How are you managing your wow program files? symlinking at all? i found that symlinking improved my city performance a ton

[TheBigBB]

This isn't going to be that helpful, but I run Dalaran very smoothly and can mount and fly around outside it with 5 characters on one computer now. The catch is that I'm running off a dual quad core Mac with 2x NVIDIA 8800 512MB video cards and 8GB RAM. Yeah.... When I used 4GB RAM and one video card, I couldn't handle it. It sucks.

[Hachoo]

I already have all the hardware/OS tweaks done that are possible.

I have an X2 2.53GHz dual core, 3GB of memory, XP 32bit, 2 SATA 7200RPM hard drives (2 WoW on 1, 3 on another), data and cache folders for all 4 clones are symlinked to primary folder. Registry change for latency trick (TCPAckDelay, etc)

Unfortunately adding more memory won't really do anything unless I also upgrade my OS, and right now I'm not willing to spend the money to do that (plus I hate vista). Also if I was going to do that I'd want to go to a quad core processor also which would require a new motherboard which make the costs go way out of control.

So anyway, just looking for WoW tricks really that could help.

Only quest addon I use is Carbonite but I will try disabling that before I go to Dalaran again. I also only really use addons on my main account, my 4 clones ONLY use ctmod (and only a few submodules) and multiboxer v2. Its really ridiculous how hard Dalaran hits. Like I said, 30-45FPS on my main account outside of Dalaran, and then if I take ONLY my main account to Dalaran and leave the other 4 somewhere else I drop to <10.

[Siaea]

First time I got ported to dalaran (with the quest at 74) 3 of my clients crashed. I then made the mistake of setting my hearth there, so every time I wanted to go to Northrend (or just leave an instance) it would take 10 minutes to load all 5 clients, with 2 or 3 of them inevitably crashing. I just moved my hearth back to somewhere else, and really try to avoid the place if I can, or load 2 at a time. It really sucks, I hope they do something about the resources used there. I never had that problem with Shat.

[pengwynman]

I already have all the hardware/OS tweaks done that are possible.

I have an X2 2.53GHz dual core, 3GB of memory, XP 32bit, 2 SATA 7200RPM hard drives (2 WoW on 1, 3 on another), data and cache folders for all 4 clones are symlinked to primary folder. Registry change for latency trick (TCPAckDelay, etc)

Unfortunately adding more memory won't really do anything unless I also upgrade my OS, and right now I'm not willing to spend the money to do that (plus I hate vista). Also if I was going to do that I'd want to go to a quad core processor also which would require a new motherboard which make the costs go way out of control.

So anyway, just looking for WoW tricks really that could help.

Only quest addon I use is Carbonite but I will try disabling that before I go to Dalaran again. I also only really use addons on my main account, my 4 clones ONLY use ctmod (and only a few submodules) and multiboxer v2. Its really ridiculous how hard Dalaran hits. Like I said, 30-45FPS on my main account outside of Dalaran, and then if I take ONLY my main account to Dalaran and leave the other 4 somewhere else I drop to <10.unfortunately, i just don't see you getting higher than ~10fps with the specs you listed. dalaran brings even the best systems to their knees... sure you're only taking one into dalaran but just having those other instances of wow taking up resources is going to have a pretty big effect. there really aren't any other tricks i can think of that would give a noticeable increase.

[FIra]

I run a 5man and I can't go to dalaran for more than 5minutes. My screens artifacts like crazy after it lags in 5 minutes.

8800gtx
Dualcore E6600
4gig ram
3 harddrives 2/2/1 accounts

[puppychow]

fwiw I was unhappy with dalaran performance a few days after Wrath. I was running 5x on a dualcore OC'd to 2.5ghz and a 8800GT w/ 4 gigs of RAM (3 gigs under XP). I moved first to this config:

PC1: c2duo 2.1ghz (unOC) w/ 8800GT and 3 gigs, running 3 clients with symlink'd WoW data\ folders
PC2: AMD dual core (4100? something like that, around 1-2 years old) with 2 gigs of RAM and 7950, running 2 clients with symlink'd WoW data\ folders

That ran ok for the most part, Dalaran still sucked but other stuff was a bit better, esp instances.

I upgraded a week ago to Vista64, added 4 gigs ($25AR from newegg!) to PC1, moved 2 gigs from PC1 to PC2 (so PC1 now has 6 gigs). I was a little hesitant that PC1 was going to suffer performance problems with Vista64, after all its a dual core PC thats nearly 2 years old now. But nope, no problems, Vista64 installed (new install, didnt upgrade) without a problem and Octopus/WoW are running fine. I don't really think Vista64 has improved anything a lot, but its nice having 64 bit and more memory to use up.

I still do get 6-15fps in Dalaran, but I don't have any load problems and all my guys have their hearth set to Dalaran. The nice thing is when I just want to play a single person I do so on PC1 (all 5 wow dirs exist on there too), only when I bring up all 5 does PC2 come into play.

Each of the machines has less than $600 in parts in it, probably even cheaper now, so its a fairly barebones cheap setup. The other nice thing is that in the future I can build a new cheap quadcore machine w/ 4870 or 260+, make PC1 into PC2 (and retire existing PC2) and I should be able to hit 30-60fps in Dalaran no problem.

[pengwynman]

I run a 5man and I can't go to dalaran for more than 5minutes. My screens artifacts like crazy after it lags in 5 minutes.

8800gtx
Dualcore E6600
4gig ram
3 harddrives 2/2/1 accountsi would assume that the reason for this is heat. i have an 8800gtx in my old comp and i know it runs hot as hell, i can't imagine running 5x wows on it

[Hachoo]

Well eventually I plan on upgrading to a 64 bit OS, 8GB of memory, and a quad core 2.5GHz processor (and overclock it to 3+GHz), but I'm the single breadwinner in my family and support my wife and daughter and we have a lot of other bills and its christmas time so a lot of money spent on presents, so buying half a new computer at this point (and in this economy) would be a pretty dumb thing for me to do :) Guess I'll just suck it up for now and hope they fix dalaran and then maybe next year sometime look at upgrading. I don't ever want to use more than 1 PC to play WoW, for multiple reasons.

[blast3r]

I hear a lot of people get horrible FPS in Dalaran. I think the best solution is to upgrade to a 64 bit OS and then get 8 gigs or better of memory. I bought a new i7 processor based computer with vista 64 and upgraded the memory to a total of 9 gigs and I have no issues at all with lag or FPS. Even raids on cities don't slow me down. With 8 gigs of memory you literally have enough storage in memory where you don't even need a hard disk swap file. I really don't think there are a lot of workarounds that would make enough of a difference with Dalaran. Shatt maybe but not this baby.

[welwyn]

just as a side note blast3r.. are the new i7 CPUs that good? i can understand the logic behind them but over say a duel core 3.2 to an i7 2.66 OC'ed to 3.2 what would be the performance improvement do you think? thats assuming you meant with similar specced other parts ( 6 gig ram atm was thinking of going for 12gig on the i7 system if its worth it?)

[Rin]

Ahh, the i7.. I was hoping someone would mention this.

I'm going to be building another comp here next week (to go along with my initial comp... specs on comp 1 are: 8 gbs RAM, e6600, vista 64, and an Nvidia card that I couldn't even begin to tell you the number of while I'm at work here... it ran me around $350ish, 1 year ago)

What I'm planning on building is as follows:

i7 920 processor (g/f gave me one of my xmas gifts :) )
12 GBs DDR3 RAM, PC-12800 spec
?? Video Card(s).. (I'm not opposed to buying two, but read my note below)

What I'm wondering is as follows:

1. SLI is currently not an option because I *NEED* to have 2 monitors running together (try doing web programming without two monitors... it sucks, trust me... and I don't want to have to unplug a monitor every time I wish to play WoW, UNLESS it's my only option). From what I've seen (one of my friends runs a SLI setup), you can only have 1 monitor active at a time w/ SLI... If theres a way around this, I would like to hear it

2. What would it take (theory crafting here) to run 10 WoW copies on 1 computer with 30 fps (min) in Dalaran? Could a single i7 Processor + 12 GBS of RAM + (the video cards you mention) handle it with 2 monitors running? Thoughts? I can currently run all 10 copies of wow on 1 computer (but the FPS begins to diminish at like 8 copies or so on my machine listed above - the 8 gb one); RAM doesn't seem to be the issue, but the gfx card does, and I'm assuming it has something to do with both monitors running.

Thank you

[Bovidae]

I have a strange relationship with FPS in Dalaran. When I first went there at 72 (mage port) I got game crashes nearly constantly. As the days went by, therse crashes came less and less frequently. Between crashes, I was getting about 5fps across all screens. As time went on, my framerate has inproved on a near daily basis. Perhaps it's lower traffic, but I cant complain about 20-10-10 fps that I get now (with the slaves capped at 10, and the main open ended)

System specs Q6600@3.0ghz, 8gb DDR2-800, 8800gts, Raptor 150gb, dual 1680x1050 monitors

[king.pa]

try to build a raid array ...
it works like a charm
I'm considering adding a third disk to my raid array...to increase loading time and decrease amount of freeze

[blast3r]

just as a side note blast3r.. are the new i7 CPUs that good? i can understand the logic behind them but over say a duel core 3.2 to an i7 2.66 OC'ed to 3.2 what would be the performance improvement do you think? thats assuming you meant with similar specced other parts ( 6 gig ram atm was thinking of going for 12gig on the i7 system if its worth it?)

I don't have any benchmarks to compare but I have noticed a huge improvement in pretty much anything I do with this new system. When you set affinity it shows 8 cores (even though it really isn't 8 but is hyperthreading). I set affinity to 2 cpus for each client and my main gets all of them. 9 gigs is enough but 12 gigs is even better!

[OzPhoenix]

I think it's pretty clear that Dalaran is the litmus test for any multiboxer setup, especially for those of us running 5 or more clients.

I can get around in Dalaran without any problems, even hearthing in, but it's noticeable that it's pushing a lot more through the system than anywhere out in the world.

Quad-core 3.0ghz, 8gig ram, 64vista, nvidia 9800gtx card here.

I don't see how it would be possible really to run Dalaran well inside a 32it OS, given the memory limitations.

[Julgas]

I have artefact and crash when i stay too long in dalaran.
I found a way, but it's a pain in the ass.
I use keyclone and i minimize each toon windows exept for my main.

[X-Ifist]

Try making a macro whit
/script SetCVar("CameraDistanceMax",1)
not shure if it still works but it will change youre view distance to minimum.

Also save a view where all youre slaves look straight down will help youre mains fps.

[Menthu]

I got all WoW windows with Minimum settings (minimum viewdistance, no fancy gfx), except the leader that I play with.

Works fine in Dalaran.

Junglelove,

-Menthu

[Thulos]

Thread Necromancy for the win. :thumbup:

[succulent]

As others have mentioned, Dalaran performance is all about your system RAM. I hardware box, and one machine has only 2gb of ram -- it takes a very long time to zone into Dal. The rest are all 4gb+ and zone in very quickly. The video card doesn't seem to make much difference here, on of my boxes has only 32gb video ram but with 4gb system ram it's just fine in Dal.

I used to box on a single machine pre-wrath, and upgraded from 4gb to 12gb due to continued fail at the Aldor rise elevator boss -- even with 5 instances running 12gb made all the difference. (This requires a 64-bit OS of course, I'm on Macs).

[Bena]

As others have said ram is usually the bottleneck. Normally my main takes around 500MB and followers about half that. In Dal my main goes up to 1.2gb and the followers up to 800mb(?). My cpu goes up to 90% from 40% (quad 2.6). Disabling addons on followers, setting maxfps to single digits and turning off sound/graphics down will help somewhat without hw upgrades.

[Caspian]

Live in the sewer. Inn there. You can go in and out of the sewer pipe. Reagent vendor. If you have to go to the surface go 1 or 2 at a time. What more do you need?

[puppychow]

I will not live in the sewer like some criminal! I CRAVE SUNSHINE AND FREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEDOM

[emesis]

Quad-core 2.2, 8 Gb, XP Pro x64 OS, SSD drive for data cache here.

Dalaran works for me (i.e. no crashes and I can get around) but is VERY painful. 5-10 fps and moveing in small chunks to prevent follower dropoff FTW.

Been thinking about trying hardware boxing, seems like 5 very cheap crappy PCs would do pretty well with WoW actually, But i have a 2 monitor setup and don't really want to go 5 screens, even crappy ones.

[Tonuss]

As others have mentioned, Dalaran performance is all about your system RAM. I hardware box, and one machine has only 2gb of ram -- it takes a very long time to zone into Dal.Heh, I was running my main on one computer and the other four characters on a second computer, a quad-core CPU with 2GB RAM. So my group hits 74 and get ported to Dalaran and... every... thing... comes... to... a... halt...

I really could not measure performance as frames-per-second, but literally by seconds-per-frame. Out of 2GB RAM, the amount shown as "free" in Task Manager hovered between 2-4MB, which meant I had run out of RAM and was thrashing the hard disks for all that they were worth. So I bit the bullet and upgraded that system to 8GB RAM and Vista 64 and presto... Dalaran was playable and in the 20-30 FPS range. Mind you, I always run the alts on the lowest graphics settings and at 800x600 per instance. The memory was the thing.

And then I quit playing WoW again. :S But that system is my main system now, and runs Photoshop like a dream...

[Dominian]

My setup is:

Quad 2.8ghz 9550,4gb ram,1gb screencard(280 something,cant remember and im at work)

This is how my clients are spread:

c: Main wow folder with the original DATA folder

e: wow2 and wow3

h: wow4 and wow5

All are symlinked from the c: drive and im wondering if this is a bold thing to do?

My c: drive is a 10000rpm drive while e: and h: is 7500rpm.

I run Vista 32 and it if i move all 5 clients into Dalaran everything freeze, Shatrath is doable but NOT with tons of other players in it.

I run everything else SMOOTH apart from Dalaran and shatrath, ofc i can struggle abit in Orgrimmar at peak times but i usualy dont lose slaves.

Its pretty clear that 3.3gb of effective ram isnt enough for 5 clients!

But im realy not sure how to handle the clients!

This is my affinity settings btw:

Main Char: Use core 1 and 2.

Slave 2: Use core 2

Slave 3: Use core 3

Slave 4: Use core 4

Slave 5: use core 3 and 4

Using 1 core on my main window is far from enough since i got heavy lag when i tried that.

[newways]

I'm in the same boat. I have to stage my toons through dalaran making sure there is no more than two in at any given time.

I'm running windows 7 32 bit(going to try 64 bit this weekend)
4 gigs of ram
Q6600
Nvidia GTX260

Is there an easy to follow guide on symlinking? i'm not into programming and some of the disclaimers I've read make me a bit nervous.

[Kicksome]

my CPU is maxed out when in Dalaran. I have 2 drives, (1 ssd), 8 gigs ram, 64 bit os. My quad core q6600 @2.8ghz spikes to 100% when I'm in the town and there are a decent number of people there. Same for WG. So it's not HD or Memory for me, it's all CPU.

[pinotnoir]

Once I quit running 5 wows on my q6600 8gig ram machine dalaran has become like any other city. I use my q6600 to run 2 wows and my new i7 12gig ram to run the other three. It's 100% better! A q6600 worked fine in BC running 5 wows. However, in wotlk it just doesnt cut it. My advice for anyone with a q6600 would be to box using 2 pc.

[king.pa]

I've bought new ram sticks : 8 GB now.. I've removed the windows swap file.; meaning all is handled into ram... my main wow takes 1.1 GB ram in dalaran and the 3 other 800 MB ... in dalaran, crowded.. my PC uses 6,5 GB of ram (firefox and some other apps launched in background...

8 GB was the last REAL upgrade I needed .. now dalaran is almost like any other area.. the /follow never brokes again and I can use my mounts in dalaran streets

[Thulos]

Once I quit running 5 wows on my q6600 8gig ram machine dalaran has become like any other city. I use my q6600 to run 2 wows and my new i7 12gig ram to run the other three. It's 100% better! A q6600 worked fine in BC running 5 wows. However, in wotlk it just doesnt cut it. My advice for anyone with a q6600 would be to box using 2 pc.I could not agree with this more. About a month ago I was completely frustrated with how my q6600, 8ghz memory, GTX 260 was running Dalaran and some areas of the game. I was torn between upgrading to an i7 and a bigger video card or fixing up my broken second machine. After much debate I bought a cheap motherboard 4 gigs of memory and a 3ghz dual core processor for my second machine and spent under $200. I added a 22inch mounted vertically for another $250 with the Ergotran mount. I now run all 5 clients (3 on the q6600 and 2 on the dual core) with absolutely zero lag in dalaran. On top of that because I'm using 4 monitors I no longer have to stare at a bunch of very small instances of wow. The lowest resolution I use is on the 22inch vertical mount where I run 2 wow's at 1050x880. I couldn't be happier. The last upgrade I need is a vertical mount for my 2 19inch monitors.

[HPB]

I'm sure it was mentioned somewhere on the forums before. If you're having problems in Dalaran, turn Magic Effects all the way down in your Video Settings. For some reason many items and architectural features in this city are made to glow and have an abundant amount of magical effects going on. Even in an empty room with no other players.... Turning those down makes a huge different for a lot of folks. When someone in the guild mentions they are having lag in town, that's the first thing we always recommend and it does the trick.

[Phanes]

Upgrade to a 64 bit and load up on the RAM. I was constantly spinning my VRaptor in Dalaran. Once I went to 12 gigs from 6 it smoothed right out. My FPS usually dip in Dalaran to about 100 or so.

I have page swap set on auto handle via Vista. I should probably make it go all RAM but I get great performance as it is.

[Starbuck_Jones]

Holy ballbag with your foot batman! Dalaran brought my systems to their knees. I have 3 boxes. Two of them run a pair of slaves each and the main box runs the leader. Leader was fine. but both of my other boxes took about 5min to load into dalaran and only lasted about 10 more minutes before wow either locked up hard, or crashed with an error report to bliz. They are not exactly weak machines. They are Dell 9150's with 2gigs of ram each dual core P4's and big honky Nvidia 9800GT's with 512megs of ram and running a pair of 10k rpm drives in a raid 0. The only addon they use is Jamba. Been playing wow on them since 2k6 and never so much as ran into a hickup but kudos to Dalran.

Even after a reboot I wasnt able to log them back in. I had to log them one at a time and fly them out on my main XPS720 box. My pagefile went through the roof to around 3gb and the cpu was having a seizure at 99% useage.

Im just about to upgrade my XPS 720 to windows 7 64 bit with 8gig of ram. a Q9550 cpu and put the big honkey video cards in it for a gig of sli lovin and 5 box just on it with a 30in monitor, but now im having doubts.