NTFS junction points

[henrik.falk]

This have been touched upon before, but i have now actually tested it.

I installed wow in a folder called wow1.
I then copied that folder, renamed the copy to wow2.
I then deleted the content of the data folder of wow2 and created an
NTFS junction point in it's place, pointing to the data directory of wow1.

I now have five copies of wow taking up very little more space then one
copy of wow. I also only have to patch one copy, since they are all really
the same. Because i'm a bit lazy the four clones share the same AddOn
directory.

I'm not sure how this behaves performance wise compared to having five
complete copies installed, but the five copies (sharing the data directory)
ran very well on my Pentium M 1.7 GHz with 2 GB of RAM.

I got about 30-40 fps on my main and 10-12 in the clone windows.

I expected more problems from this, especially from sharing the AddOn
folder among the clones. But i haven't seen any problems so far.
I'll come back when i do :-)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS_junction_point

[Xzin]

I would love to see some tests done on if 5 copies, 1 copy or 5 linked copies is best and fastest. Also, what difference does Raid and solid state drives have on things?

I always had separate machines.... which I suppose is ideal. But now that you CAN 5 box on 1 machine...... what works best? Does it even matter that much?

[zanthor]

I have experimented with both on Vista with Symbolic Links (Same thing as a junction) and have found that there is no performance difference. I would imagine that if I had a separate hard drive for each install it would be faster to have separate installs on each.

One thing you'll have to keep in mind, is that when patch day comes you may need to copy the files in wow1\* to wow2\* (not the subfolders, just the files) because the patcher will do all the dirty work it needs to in the first wow but that really leaves the 2nd wow in a very confused state if they modified the executable.

[henrik.falk]

I have experimented with both on Vista with Symbolic Links (Same thing as a junction) and have found that there is no performance difference. I would imagine that if I had a separate hard drive for each install it would be faster to have separate installs on each.

One thing you'll have to keep in mind, is that when patch day comes you may need to copy the files in wow1\* to wow2\* (not the subfolders, just the files) because the patcher will do all the dirty work it needs to in the first wow but that really leaves the 2nd wow in a very confused state if they modified the executable.

For that there are hard links :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_link

But yes, good point.

[Parsous]

Unless you have separate drives (Or RAID arrays for those with more hardware :)) there is no real performance gain from running 1 wow directory vs. 5 outside of space.

This assumes the following
- Files across all copies not fragmented
- All copies have the same content

When a client requests information off the hard drive it will seek to the location on the drive, fetch the information and move on doing it's business. It doesn't really matter where the information is on the drive, the request will take the same amount of time. With the way WoW handles loading files local HDD cache won't make much of a difference either since your most used files are loaded into RAM and it's typically requesting a part of the .MPQ that hasn't been hit lately.

[Jayded1]

I had 1 HD dedicated to WoW that had 4 seperate copies of WoW. Dalaran was pretty rough so seeing as I have 3 HD I put 1 copy on Drive 1, 2 copies on Drive 2 and 1 copy on Drive 3. I created NTFS junctions for the 2 copies on Drive 2 and I cna't describe the fps and load speed increase. All hail NTFS junctions.

WinXP
3 Gigs RAM
2.8 AMD Dual-Core
Nvidia GeForce 9600GT

[Fef]

I got a brand new Mac Pro. I need it for work. Well, never mind, I'll also play on it. :)
My bootcamp partition, system and programs, is now on an 60GB OCZ Vertex SSD. At about 200 euros, it is certainly expensive for the storage volume, but it REALLY makes a difference. I can run five characters in Dalaran now, on mounts even, without any lag. My iMac used to choke on two characters. I really feel like disk access was the limiting factor there. I didn't test my new machine running WoW from a regular hard drive though.