Symlink Interface folder or no?

[lans83]

I was wondering if there was any downside to setting up each of my 4 account's folders with their own Interface folder for the addons so that they each have their own? Or would it be best on my system to just keep the folder symlinked from my main folder?

[Caspian]

I link it and enable/disable addons per toon per account. Settings are saved in your WTF folder so you don't have issues overwriting any thing if that is your concern.

[Jubber]

What Caspian said. It saves you some space. Nothing is written into those folders. All your specifics are saved to the WTF folder. You can have your own interface folders but there is no real reason to do so.

[puppychow]

its much easier to update addons when you have them symlinked, updating 5 folders worth of addons sucks. i keep wtf\ unsymlinked, but I DO symlink wtf\account, that way I can log into any of my wow chars from any of my wow folders, but each wow folder has its own video/gfx settings and each wow char has its on addons-loaded setting.

[Mikey]

I symlink my add-ons folder for easier updating. It's much easier to disable unwanted add-ons on both main and slave installs than it is to keep add-ons up to date for 4x different addon folders.

[Chorizotarian]

I also simlink and update virtually all of them w/ the Curse Updater. Makes the whole thing incredibly painless.

[Crucial]

yes, for the reason above but as for innerspace/isboxer users, you don't even need to symlink. Just have 1 wow folder and then virtualize your config.wtf for each character. Makes updating addons and patching a no brainer.

[king.pa]

I do simlink lot of folders :
Data, Account & Interface

I'll probably symlink some of my .lua files or even better : symlink the SavedVariables folder (at least on my clones) to simplify the whole configuration and update process.

symlink rock !!

[Otlecs]

I think the original question has been answered (yes, it's best to symlink your interface folder for ease of maintenance), but this has caught my eye:


I do simlink lot of folders :
Data, Account & Interface
If you symlink all this lot (especially the data folder!) then what's the point of multiple installations at all? Surely you're driving all the I/O traffic back to a single physical disk in any case?

It seems to me that symlinking in this way completely defeats the purpose of having multiple installations in the first place.

I'm obviously missing something - what is it?

[softflow]

Otlecs,

While I can't get technical with it as I haven't read up on symlinking in a few months, I can give you my experience. I have a Velociraptor HD and I ran all 5 accounts on 1 machine, in 3 install directories (main1, slave1 & 2, slave3 & 4). I hadn't symlinked and I was noticing lots of long load times hearthing, etc and lost-follows in heavy traffic areas. Once I symlinked my data and interface folders in the 2 slave installs to the main install, all of this virtually disappeared. I never again lost follow in Shat (haven't boxed in WotLK yet) and the longer load times across the toons (addon & data loading basically) returned almost back to the same as when I was soloing.

It's good to have the separate installs so you can assign multiple cores in keyclone, and I'm sure there's other benefits, but you do raise a good question. I would imagine each user would see different results depending on their system setup. For me, symlinking was a huge improvement!

[Otlecs]

That's really interesting, and I do understand how that would be a gain in your configuration, with all the installations on a single disk. I wasn't really thinking about that to be honest, and it's a very fair point.

For what it's worth though, it's a different situation when your installations are spread across multiple disks.

My setup consists of:

- 1TB RAID configured "normal" disk (drive C)
- OCZ Core 64 SSD (G)
- 300GB VelociRaptor (H)

I've tried lots of configurations and finally settled on:

- WoW main on H with no symlinks.
- WoW drone on G with symlinks as follows: Screenshots to WoW main
Interface to WoW main
WTF to a dedicated folder on C.I didn't keep any of the imperical measurements I took during the various iterations (and there were many!), but this is the absolute fastest configuration for me.

The majority of the reads are from the Data directory, so you really wouldn't ever want that symlinked across drives, but you would absolutely want it linked if all installations are on a single drive.

The WTF folder seems to get lots of small writes, and SSD drives are particularly bad at that, so moving that to the RAID array whilst leaving the big data files on the SSD drive had a visible effect under some circumstances.


It's good to have the separate installs so you can assign multiple cores in keyclone
You don't need multiple installations to do this - just multiple KC commands invoking the same installation :)

I run 1x"WoW main" from drive H and 4x"WoW Drones" (DroneA, DroneB, etc Keyclone commands) from the same installation directory on drive G. I recall anecdotal evidence that this causes problems for some people, but I've never had a problem myself.

[Ughmahedhurtz]

I link it and enable/disable addons per toon per account. Settings are saved in your WTF folder so you don't have issues overwriting any thing if that is your concern.

[lans83]

Thanks for all the input and advice here. I've decided to keep it setup the way Caspian suggested, which is how I already had it anyway. I haven't had any real problems with it this way, and since I know now where the settings are saved to for the addons, I know what to watch for when coping files and folders over from my main directory after each patch. I noticed after I'd copy over files from my main to slaves, that the seetings in my slave's addons would keep getting reset. Solution was to stop coping WTF files from main to slaves.