Creating a second WoW folder

[Tofino]

Hi all. So I'm having fun with this and tried a few 3-man combinations all of which work great. I then tried 5-man and it was unplayable. I shut off all addons except Jamba/ISBoxer and minimized all perf options -- still no. I used performance monitor and was surprised to find that my bottleneck was disk usage -- while entering the game I would pin at 100% cpu, but that would drop to 50-60% during game. Memory usage (of 4G) sat around 70%. Disk usage was pinned. If I /quit and exited one of the 5, the game immediately became playable, though not as "nice" as with just 3.

So if disk is my problem, I'm hoping that having a second WoW folder on a different physical drive (and assigning toons 4 and 5 to that folder) might fix this. But I'm guessing that simply copying the entire WoW folder over to the other drive isn't going to do it. Do I need to reinstall (argh!) or is there a simpler solution? I looked through the wiki and previous posts and found no answer.

Of course there's always the possibility that I'll do this and the bottleneck will be the throughput on the HD controller/bridge/whatever it is these days, but I can't find that out until I have the second folder can I :). Thanks all.

[Nilz]

Just copy it over :)

[thinus]

You are running 5x WoW on 4GB? Last time I checked my WoWs were sitting on 1GB memory each. I suspect it might be a swap file issue and the 70% memory usage you saw may be misleading.

[Ualaa]

Right click, copy, new destination and paste.

Then run so many copies with one executable.
And so many with the other.

For patching, just patch one of them and copy/paste.
You might want to paste the WTF files for each specific character on both copies.
So you can run any toon from either, fine.

With more then one drive, you will not want to sym link.
Since that would have the other copy use the first copy for certain files.





I'd consider a low end SSD, purely for your gaming folder.

If the hard disk is your bottleneck, this will help immensely.

And even if something else is the bottleneck, it is a huge upgrade which will remain useful for quite some time.

[Tofino]

I saw each WoW instance as taking ~300M. Thanks for the replies as this will be very simple, then. I'll find out quickly if the disk is actually my bottleneck. I see many others have said that they are 5boxing on 4G, though with better CPU than me, so I'm unsure if it's REALLY my bottleneck and perhaps my evidence was wrong, but I'm IT and gotta follow the clues I'm given don't I :).

[wowphreak]

What operating system are yeh running.

With xp you only get about at max 3.5 gigs to use, xp also require at min 1 gig for itself to run.
So with using xp with minimum of services running and no other apps you have 2.5 gigs for apps.
Wow require anywhere from 300 megs to over 800 depending on resolution yeh play at, to where in the game yeh are.

The only time yeh should have yer harddrive pegged is when yer loading into a new area/instance and when yeh dont have enough memory and it'll try pageing out one of the wow's which will cause it to time out and log off.

vista require almost twice the amount of memory to run as compared to xp.

Your not gonna get any improvement using another folder/drive

[Tofino]

What operating system are yeh running.

With xp you only get about at max 3.5 gigs to use, xp also require at min 1 gig for itself to run.
So with using xp with minimum of services running and no other apps you have 2.5 gigs for apps.
Wow require anywhere from 300 megs to over 800 depending on resolution yeh play at, to where in the game yeh are.

The only time yeh should have yer harddrive pegged is when yer loading into a new area/instance and when yeh dont have enough memory and it'll try pageing out one of the wow's which will cause it to time out and log off.

vista require almost twice the amount of memory to run as compared to xp.

Your not gonna get any improvement using another folder/drive

Using wow folders on two physical drives, I'm able to run 4 clients at once, whereas 4 clients on a single drive chugs along at an unacceptable speed. 5 clients on a single drive is 2fps-city, and on 2 drives is a bit better but not really playable. Not sure why this is, but a post above suggesting it's swap-file-related is probably right. I just don't have the machine to 5-box right now.

[Drommon]

Given everything you said the best upgrade for you imo would be a 32gb SSD and/or 2-4gb more ram. I would lean on getting more ram first . Later get a SSD. Only put wow folders on the ssd and nothing else. If you are comfortable with symlinking you can get a performance boost with that too.

Drommon

[Tofino]

Given everything you said the best upgrade for you imo would be a 32gb SSD and/or 2-4gb more ram. I would lean on getting more ram first . Later get a SSD. Only put wow folders on the ssd and nothing else. If you are comfortable with symlinking you can get a performance boost with that too.

Drommon

I'm upgrading the whole machine in January anyway, so I'll grab 8G then. Not sure how creating symlinks helps with performance -- it's still acting on the same physical file, ne?