Major Lag

[alcattle]

I have my first 5 toon team up and running. Or should I say walking? People talk about getting lag in Dalaran, I get it in Stormwind. BAD slideshow slow. I know I need RAM as the Gadget is redlined. Does the RAM affect the updates or am I looking at a GPU upgrade? I am running a 8800 GTS 320. So what 2-3 year old now? 2 monitors are no problem and running in the forest works fine. Thanks for any advice.

[Ferrea]

With some more detail I could help I suppose. What kind of memory and cpu do you have? What are your video settings?

[emesis]

I have my first 5 toon team up and running. Or should I say walking? People talk about getting lag in Dalaran, I get it in Stormwind. BAD slideshow slow. I know I need RAM as the Gadget is redlined. Does the RAM affect the updates or am I looking at a GPU upgrade? I am running a 8800 GTS 320. So what 2-3 year old now? 2 monitors are no problem and running in the forest works fine. Thanks for any advice.

I'm running the same card and my performance is pretty good in all but Dalaran (or of course Wintergrasp). I run 5 instances on one PC with keyclone.

Among the various things I've doneto try to tweak performance was adding another 8800 GTS to run my second monitor. I saw no difference in performance to speak of.

I would look to your I/O, memory, and CPU first if you're getting lag that bad.

Also, no matter what, you will need to drop your video settings on your 4 slaves, esp. the maxfpsbk setting. We really need more details about your system setup and what you've done to optimize things.

For running 5 instances on a single PC, my opinion is you really need 8 gigs RAM. Or at the minimum a 64 bit OS (XP x64 or Vista) that utilizes a full 4 Ggb. I'm on a quad-core CPU as well, though an older one.

[alcattle]

Should added those other things. CPU Q6600; OS Vista 64; HD newer WD 500gig. I will check the Gfx settings. The other Vista Gadget shows CPU and never hits 50%.

[heffner]

I ran four instances of WoW on a similar setup with no problems. My video card is even a lower model, a 9800GT. I have 8Gigs of RAM. You didn't mention how much RAM you have. My video settings are relatively low.

Is the Blizzard background downloader running without throttling?

You probably just have some of the graphic settings too high. Things like viewing distance and particle effects can really kill the FPS.

[alcattle]

Trying to upgrade to 8 gigs. A different problem there. Will check the settings after I get the RAM working

[lans83]

you'll want to disable the extra visual effects on your slaves as well, like the ghost effect, shadows, and screen glow. these can also hinder the performance. this hurt mine in dalaran alone running one account. i turned them off and my fps actually went up. this was with no one around mind you. so it's best to turn those off on all your accounts for better performance. make sure you set the fpsbk anywhere from 5 to 15 and the fpsmax to what ever you want, i set mine to 60. if you run keyclone, you can do this in the setup along with changing the affinity for each account. make sure each is on a separate core. on a quad, main on 0, slave 1 on 1, 2 on 2, and slaves 3&4 on 3. i'm on a duo, so i set mine to main on 0 and slaves 1-3 on 1, i'm only runnin 4 accounts for now. make sure your video card driver is up to date also. if it's nvidia, they released a beta patch recently for a broad range of cards that my laptop manufacturer didn't even let me download. not even windows update would grab it, so i had to get it manually. think it's helped my performance since. symlinking the data folder vs running one from each account folder can also benefit your performance and cause less wear and tear on your system. my cpu usage stays around 50% and still have about a gig of ram left. another thing, i keep all my slaves windows minimized when not accessing them. the size of each window may also eat up ram and performance, so shrink the slave's if your main doesn't die that often.

here's my system if you wanna know what i'm running on.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834115475

[CommanderChaos]

As far as setting CPU affinity, I've seen a marked improvement in my quad-core setup by NOT setting any wow instances to core 0; but spreading them out between the other cores. My focus window has affinity set to 1, the second and third instances are set to 2, and the fourth and fifth are set to 3. This allows all standard OS processes to run unhindered on core 0 and not cause hitching in the wow instances. With a dual core running 5 boxes, I'd put only 2 on core 0 and the other 3 on core 1. My two cents.

[Freddie]

The other Vista Gadget shows CPU and never hits 50%.
By default, WoW restricts itself to running on cores 0 and 1, so if you don't set the affinity manually, WoW can only use half your CPU at most.

I suggest setting the affinity of every WoW so it can run on every core. This gives the operating system maximum power to optimize thread scheduling.

[alcattle]

I did SetAffinty All in HKN. Still having trouble with the RAM. I will try again when I get home. Sounds like that and the gfx setting are the leading causes.

[alcattle]

All is well. 8 gigs seemed to be the answer. No stuttering in cities and all, getting about 30 FpS so I think the setup part is done. Thanks for all the help