Framerate just tanked.....

[pythos]

Hi folks,

Been running 5 accounts for a while now with no problems. All of a sudden today I log on and once I get 5 instances of WoW going my framefate tanks. Usually it runs around 25-30 no problem. My system is as follows...

Vista 64
Intel Quad Core 2.8Ghz
8GB of RAM
Nvidia 9600GT video card.
2 21" monitors

I don't think it's the system or else I would have had problems before this. I tried loading individual instances without keyclone maximizer and that did not help. What's odd is if I close down 1 of the 5 instances and just run 4 it seems to be ok. I'm downloading the latest video drivers now although the ones I had were only maybe a month or 2 old. Any thoughts?

[Falkor]

Do you usually have windows media player open?
Just out of curiosity try running all 5 with windows media player open but not playing any music unless you want to of course :)
You need to make sure you have the "Now Playing" tab selected in wmp.

There is an issue with the timing on dual/quad core processors that only occurs in wow and limits the FPS rather low.

Give it a shot and let me know.

[pythos]

Never have WMP open...I'm a WinAmp guy =)

I tried opening WMP and it dosen't help. Latest Nvidia drivers installed and that didn't help either. I'm at a loss as to what the heck happened from last night to today.

I also tried setting the max FPS in the keyclone maximizer to 25 for my clones and 40 for my main just to see what happened. Didn't think that was it though because I've still have the problem even without Keyclone running.

[suicidesspyder]

Yea if someone finds out let me know as well because my laptop was banging it out before no lag no fps issue smooth sailing. Then one day i log in the blah i get 10fps on slaves and 36 on main then after a lil while it gets to where main is 10 and slaves are less. Also have the issue of the drop out for a little bit then it picks back up fine then drops again.

[Falkor]

Ok you could slowly be pushing down towards hardware now....

Do you run all you're wow.exe from the same folder?
Yes: Have you done a hard disk defrag lately..

Does the FPS appear to be decreased on the login screen or just in game?
This would further push towards hardware related issues.

Does it always occur on the last wow.exe you open?
Yes: Check you're memory usuage and see if its using more then normal

I could through alot more suggestions at this but get back to me with the above first :)

[Falkor]

Yea if someone finds out let me know as well because my laptop was banging it out before no lag no fps issue smooth sailing. Then one day i log in the blah i get 10fps on slaves and 36 on main then after a lil while it gets to where main is 10 and slaves are less. Also have the issue of the drop out for a little bit then it picks back up fine then drops again.

When I multibox x2 on my laptop with 1Gb of ram I use to find it was rather slow and FPS was up and down more then a yoyo.
Try changing you're windows paging file to around 256mb lower and higher limit and see if this helps.

What this does is cause's programs like wow to run directly on the physical ram thus allowing you're hard disk to better serve the content and thus increasing FPS :)

[suicidesspyder]

Yea if someone finds out let me know as well because my laptop was banging it out before no lag no fps issue smooth sailing. Then one day i log in the blah i get 10fps on slaves and 36 on main then after a lil while it gets to where main is 10 and slaves are less. Also have the issue of the drop out for a little bit then it picks back up fine then drops again.

When I multibox x2 on my laptop with 1Gb of ram I use to find it was rather slow and FPS was up and down more then a yoyo.
Try changing you're windows paging file to around 256mb lower and higher limit and see if this helps.

What this does is cause's programs like wow to run directly on the physical ram thus allowing you're hard disk to better serve the content and thus increasing FPS :)If i could be a noob for a second which i kinda am where would i change the windows paging file at. I have everything else like defrag and clean up and software run once a week auto. So one day while i am at class for 5 hrs i leave my computer on and the computer scans and everything so when i get back only thing i might have to do is quarentine viruses which is hardley ever. So just let me know where i can change paging files at thanks.

[Falkor]

Yea if someone finds out let me know as well because my laptop was banging it out before no lag no fps issue smooth sailing. Then one day i log in the blah i get 10fps on slaves and 36 on main then after a lil while it gets to where main is 10 and slaves are less. Also have the issue of the drop out for a little bit then it picks back up fine then drops again.

When I multibox x2 on my laptop with 1Gb of ram I use to find it was rather slow and FPS was up and down more then a yoyo.
Try changing you're windows paging file to around 256mb lower and higher limit and see if this helps.

What this does is cause's programs like wow to run directly on the physical ram thus allowing you're hard disk to better serve the content and thus increasing FPS :)If i could be a noob for a second which i kinda am where would i change the windows paging file at. I have everything else like defrag and clean up and software run once a week auto. So one day while i am at class for 5 hrs i leave my computer on and the computer scans and everything so when i get back only thing i might have to do is quarentine viruses which is hardley ever. So just let me know where i can change paging files at thanks.

vista or xp?

[suicidesspyder]

Sorry my bad vista. I have 4gb ram so i should be good from what your other post states.

[Falkor]

Sorry my bad vista. I have 4gb ram so i should be good from what your other post states.

http://www.mydigitallife.info/2008/02/26/tweak-windows-vista-virtual-memory-change-or-disable-paging-file-size/

Initial Size: 256MB
Max Size: 256MB

You can try just removing the page file completely but I've seen alot of computers lose drivers or have issues afterwards so its recommended to set a 256MB lower and upper limit.

The reason behind setting the same values is it stops the paging file in windows dynamically increasing its self, which cause's more CPU/Hard disk time to be used up.

A reboot will be required afterwards and you should notice Wow loads quite a bit quicker as well as maybe a slight FPS increase.

Let me know how it goes.

[suicidesspyder]

Ok i just did that but due to the schools lack of sufficient bandwidth i cant play wow here just says you've been disconnected. But it seemed using pip i didnt have much fps skipping withing the log in screens but will find out later this week like thursday when i get home. Since i have so much extra time for 3 days like 19 hrs worth i figured i would try and get some things set and fixed so i might be able to play better. On another not whats better for gaming dell or gateway out of the two biggest from what i can see for computers.

[Falkor]

well I'm a network engineer that works with Dell servers all day long and currently use a Dell laptop for work.
I heavily recommend any of the Dell XPS systems be them laptop or desktop, I can almost promise you an amazing experience :)

[elsegundo]

is your system dusty? try a can of dust off to it.

[suicidesspyder]

Ok good cause i currently have a dell xps m1530 laptop. I love this desktop and its ability to run 5 clients of wow at the same time with not much of an issue till of late. I think its due to the page filing might have killed it a little bit because i never had this issue before i think i just overworked it a little bit. I am actually talking to dell to get a free replacement hence under warranty wewt. Then at that time im going to reinstall wow vent and my addons and change the page filing as long as it seems to work on this one. I miss having 40 fps on main and on slaves 15-20. Yea i clean my computer once a week i take the panels on the bottom off and spray it. Im just wondering next if i can get the replacement suggest that they change my current video card from the nvidia 8600m gt to the 9800 what you think big upgrade or no.

[pythos]

Do you run all you're wow.exe from the same folder?
Yes I do...I'll run a defrag today when I leave for work and see what happens.

Does the FPS appear to be decreased on the login screen or just in game?
Login screen FPS is fine. It's actually fine once I get in the game too. Once I start moving around and doing things is when it tanks.

Does it always occur on the last wow.exe you open?
No. Even if I switch around to the other windows it still has the problem.

I was running task manager while this was all going on. CPU would peak at about 50% on the first 2 cores and the other 2 were running below 10. Memory usage looked ok to me. Each Instance is using about 1.5GB of RAM (I have 8GB total). One thing I did just check was the virtual memory. I just recently upgraded this system to 64 bit and when I did that I forgot to set the page file. I'll try setting it and moving it to the drive on the second SATA channel and see if that helps. I guess the old 1.5 times your RAM rule isn't going to apply with 8GB of RAM. I'll play with the size and see what works best.

[Catamer]

my frame rate seems to be all over the place too.
I have a the NVidia 280 and only running 3 copes of wow on that machine. It normally does 30 fps per window ( maximizer limited ) without a problem but lately one of the windows will do 5 FPS.
I've tried new video drivers but it didn't fix it.
seems more likely to get into the 5 FPS when in Dalaran as opposed to an instance.

I think I'm going to try disabling addons and see if that fixes anything.

I run all of my copies from one folder and a two drive raid-0, 8G ram and an intel 3Ghz Quad core.

[-silencer-]

well I'm a network engineer that works with Dell servers all day long and currently use a Dell laptop for work.
I heavily recommend any of the Dell XPS systems be them laptop or desktop, I can almost promise you an amazing experience :) Yeah, that works when you're a business or looking for a laptop, but I won't recommend any Dell full-size system when there are SO MANY better options available for gaming at the price.

[pythos]

Shadows.....I had everything turned down except for shadows. Don't know why. After turning everything completely down it now appears to be working fine.

[suicidesspyder]

Hey falkor since you said you work with dells quick question. Ive been looking everywhere but cant get a str8 answer can the dell xps m1530 be upgraded to 8gb memory and if so can you point me to a site so i can buy the right one. Thanks.

[Vicker]

I usually use my framerate to heal, but if you've had success with it tanking then that's great.

[Ticks]

Sorry my bad vista. I have 4gb ram so i should be good from what your other post states.

http://www.mydigitallife.info/2008/02/26/tweak-windows-vista-virtual-memory-change-or-disable-paging-file-size/

Initial Size: 256MB
Max Size: 256MB

You can try just removing the page file completely but I've seen alot of computers lose drivers or have issues afterwards so its recommended to set a 256MB lower and upper limit.

The reason behind setting the same values is it stops the paging file in windows dynamically increasing its self, which cause's more CPU/Hard disk time to be used up.

A reboot will be required afterwards and you should notice Wow loads quite a bit quicker as well as maybe a slight FPS increase.

Let me know how it goes.
The swap file is a vital component of the operating system and actually improves performance, not degrades it. The pagefile is used to store data in a contiguous file located on a hard drive. Data that is used less frequently or when swapped out from memory, it is stored in the swapfile. This means that when the OS needs data that doesn't reside in physical memory, it has to go to the disk. If the data was in memory once before, it would know exactly where to go in the swapfile to get it. If the swapfile isn't there, it has to find it again from somewhere on the disk. Also, Windows also uses a prefetch fucntion to actually forecast what files you need and puts it into the pagefile before the application actually requests it.

If your're experiencing high disk activity there are things you can try to reduce it. First, disk drives with more buffer memory helps tons. Second, the faster the hard drive in terms of RPM is very helpful. 7200 RPM is the minimum for mutliboxing on a single system. 10K or even 15K is a huge performance boost. I am going to assume everyone that multiboxes on a single system maxes out their memory to 4gb or more (64bit) so I won't bother saying anything about memory qty.

As far as tweaking the pagefile, you can set the minimum and maximum swapfile size to 4096MB so it doesn't have to automatically adjust itself and you can put it on a separate drive from where the OS is running from. Also, defrag the drive where the swapfile is located often.

[Svpernova09]

dell xps m1530
According to http://www.dell.com/content/products/productdetails.aspx/xpsnb_m1530?c=us&cs=19&l=en&s=dhs

It's only up to 4g. I'd try to find out which motherboard you have and see if there are any tech docs out there on it. Look for your Express Service ID on the bottom of the laptop and put that into http://support.dell.com and you can pull up your part numbers to google around.

[Catamer]

Ok, I've read all of the posts about FPS and I've tried all of them.
I have even put the game on a Intel X25-e drive and sym linked it. It loads really fast and the disk drive is definately not the problem.
The problem was there before the drive and still there after the drive.
I don't believe I've ever tanked inside of an instance.
I tank when I leave an instance or go to Dalaran.
I don't think that two or three copies of wow should tank even if Dalaran is fully loaded with people.

Vista x64
I have a DQ45CB motherboard that claims to have a PCI-E 2.0 slot.
I have 8G of ram ( nothing fancy or overclocked 800M or something like that )
I have a Q9550 ( or a 3GHz quad core )
I currently have a Nvida 280 , although I have used ATI 4870 and then I have the old Nvida 8800.

of all of the combo's the Nvida 8800 never tanks my FPS while both of the PCI-E 2.0 video cards tank. I was down to 1 FPS and couldn't even hardly log off.
I'm only running 3 copies of wow on the tanking machine and at one time I was running two copies of wow and it still tanked.
The other machine I have never tanks either and it's currenty running two copies of wow and an ATI 1800XT.

I supposed the only other thing that I can think of to compare is that the tanking machine has two monitors connected to one video card.
I only ever used one monitor on the tanking machine when I was using the NVidia 8800 ( the NVidia 8800 was able to run 4 copies of wow with the FPS limited to 15 )

I suppose I can try using one monitor and see if it still tanks.

[weeep]

Try minimizing all your WoW windows (Win+D) and then restoring them. It usually helps when I suddenly get extremely low framerate, sometimes have to do this trick twice before it works.

[Falkor]

Hey falkor since you said you work with dells quick question. Ive been looking everywhere but cant get a str8 answer can the dell xps m1530 be upgraded to 8gb memory and if so can you point me to a site so i can buy the right one. Thanks.


8192MB 800 MHz Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM (2x4GB)

Above is the max for this laptop :)

[Falkor]

dell xps m1530
According to http://www.dell.com/content/products/productdetails.aspx/xpsnb_m1530?c=us&cs=19&l=en&s=dhs

It's only up to 4g. I'd try to find out which motherboard you have and see if there are any tech docs out there on it. Look for your Express Service ID on the bottom of the laptop and put that into http://support.dell.com and you can pull up your part numbers to google around.

The XPS 1530 only supports upto 4GB.
The XPS M1530 supports upto 8GB in the configuation I've listed above.

Please check your information next time before posting false info.

[Falkor]

Ok, I've read all of the posts about FPS and I've tried all of them.
I have even put the game on a Intel X25-e drive and sym linked it. It loads really fast and the disk drive is definately not the problem.
The problem was there before the drive and still there after the drive.
I don't believe I've ever tanked inside of an instance.
I tank when I leave an instance or go to Dalaran.
I don't think that two or three copies of wow should tank even if Dalaran is fully loaded with people.

Vista x64
I have a DQ45CB motherboard that claims to have a PCI-E 2.0 slot.
I have 8G of ram ( nothing fancy or overclocked 800M or something like that )
I have a Q9550 ( or a 3GHz quad core )
I currently have a Nvida 280 , although I have used ATI 4870 and then I have the old Nvida 8800.

of all of the combo's the Nvida 8800 never tanks my FPS while both of the PCI-E 2.0 video cards tank. I was down to 1 FPS and couldn't even hardly log off.
I'm only running 3 copies of wow on the tanking machine and at one time I was running two copies of wow and it still tanked.
The other machine I have never tanks either and it's currenty running two copies of wow and an ATI 1800XT.

I supposed the only other thing that I can think of to compare is that the tanking machine has two monitors connected to one video card.
I only ever used one monitor on the tanking machine when I was using the NVidia 8800 ( the NVidia 8800 was able to run 4 copies of wow with the FPS limited to 15 )

I suppose I can try using one monitor and see if it still tanks.

If your graphics card has 2video outputs (DVI) then your graphics card may have a setting called "Multi Monitor Split GPU" which basically trys to divide your graphics cards processing power 50/50 across both monitors.
If you only using a single monitor you can set this option to "Single Monitor GPU" which should be available under the advanced 3d settings on your graphics cards control panel.

[suicidesspyder]

Ok falkor i have a dell xpsm 1530 but its a 2.5 ghz its got 4 gb in it now but your saying that it has to be 800 huh to work.

[Falkor]

If you we're to try and purchase a new Dell XPS M1530 on their website and choose customise the only 8GB memory option available to you will be:

8192MB 800 MHz Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM (2x4GB)

So going by this, this is the only type of ram/configuration you will be able to use to achieve 8GB of memory.

[suicidesspyder]

dang it lol now one other thing looked all over my latop how do i find hard drive size without opening i want to upgrade it if its at all possible.

[Falkor]

dang it lol now one other thing looked all over my latop how do i find hard drive size without opening i want to upgrade it if its at all possible.

On the bottom of your laptop will be a Dell Service Tag like BX75G34 for example.

Type this tag into the drivers and downloads section of dell.co.uk and it should show you the exact spec of your model that was shipping to you including information such as upgrades and warranty dates etc.

[suicidesspyder]

Hard Drive,250GB,Serial ATA 9.5,5.4K,W125

This is my hard drive i should be able to get a bigger one right.

[Falkor]

500GB maybe at the most again by going through the process on dell.co.uk to buy your laptop, then choose customise and it will show you all the available hard drives / sizes.

[Catamer]

Multi-monitor / single monitor

Well, I tried just one monitor last night and upped the resolution on it to 1920x1200 and moved all 3 copies of wow on to the single montor.
it seem just ok while trying to do the DK begining quests, but then it has seemed ok outside of Dalaran before.

I then loaded a single character and went to the Naxx raid and I got at best 15 fps... is that all anyone else is getting in Naxx?
I know I didn't need 1920x1200 resolution for it but still, that seemed to be pretty poor performace since I'm used to 60 fps 90% of the time.

I'm going to try a bios upgrade but I'm having issues with the INTEL bios upgrade ... it just doesn't work :-(

[Catamer]

I'm not 100% sure but I think it was Gatherer.
I kind of think it affected my miner & herbalist more than other characters and I usually lead my teams with one of those two.
I disabled all of my addons and everything was fast again, I've turned back on quite a few of them and I still don't have a problem.
if I find it was something other than Gatherer I will let you know.