Memory issue running 4 clients on one computer?

[Grogin]

I have a 4 shaman team running on a single computer 2.4GHz CORE 2 DUO with 2 gigs of ram. Everything was running just fine until my team jumped on a zeppelin to head to UC, when the transition map screen came on and stayed on... I had 4 windows with the transition map screen and my hard drive screaming for dear life...I assumed I did not have the RAM necessary for that, because a similar thing happens when I go to Org, I get laggy and the frame rates drop like a rock.

I have a Geforce 8800 GTS with 640 MB. and as I listed above only 2gigs of DDR2 800 PC2 6400 memory. I also run WIndows XP. So my question is, do I just need to drop in 2 more gigs to alleviate this problem (even though windows will only see 3 of it) or is there something else I need to add??? ?(

Thanks for any help, this has been a great community for my new hobby and I'm loving it...
Oh shout out to Keyclone and all his help getting that awesome program working for me. :thumbup:

[Bobby Bobbsen]

i used 5 wow-instances on one pc with 2 gb ram - entering sw made my pc almost freeze and my hard drives nearly exploded - uses process explorer, i saw i had only 50 mb free memory left - so i think he tried to use the swap on my hard disk - atm i'm using 2 pcs, also i'm getting 2gb ram to add them to my main pc, maybe it works with 4 gb and a new xp with 64bit support :D

[zanthor]

You have a memory issue. With 3 clients and 2gb you should be fine, but you will be bumping the overhead at that point. Once you hit 4 clients you are solidly into the need 3gb of ram territory.

[Grogin]

Thanks for the reply, just ordered another 2 gigs from Newegg. :thumbsup:

[Nitro]

The more clients you have per harddrive the more they will fight over harddrive access. If possible spread them out a bit.

The difference between 1 harddrive hosting 4 clients and each client folder having its own harddrive is huge.

[Grogin]

@ NITRO I was just thinking about that...think I will slap another SATA2 Drive in there and dump two of the WOW directories there. Thanks!!

[Xar]

Does anyone with 4g-8g RAM have issues with running 4-5 wows out of only 1 WoW folder? I would many of the files get cached in memory when having so much extra ram. If I end up getting multiple drives is it possible in Vista to point all WTF to my main C drive WTF? Trying to keep macros and data like Posessions info all in one place.

[Xzin]

Loading new zones places an enormous load on your hard drive and RAM. If you run out of RAM, you start swapping. On top of the normal hard drive load requirements. 7200 RPM hard drives have about 45 MB/sec constraints per single normal non raid, non solid state, non RAM drive. You eventually cap out hard drive bus bandwidth but for most modern motherboard Northbridges, that's not going to happen, even with 5 drives at ~250 total MB/sec. If so, get a 1x PCI-E card and you are set.

Anyway, when you load 1 WoW, it reads it at full blast with no swapping. Add 3 more that all need the data THEN add swapping? You will be lucky to get off the Zepp before it loads again. That ~45 MB limit is per drive and scales quite linearly with the number of drives. Add more RAM and consider adding an extra drive or two (they are cheap these days). You will see a huge improvement. Also consider cranking your settings down.

[Khayos]

I run Windows XP 3.0ghz Dual Core and 4gb of DDR2 ram with 5 clients running from the same HD and I still lag when loading new areas, it will definitely be your hard drive . I'm looking into throwing a few more in and see how I fair then.

[Xar]

Thanks for the feedback. I will definitely get some extra drives.

Is anyone that has multiple drives mapping the WTF folder to point back to the main one to keep all the unique account stuff together in one place, macros, addon data, etc.?

[Grogin]

Loading new zones places an enormous load on your hard drive and RAM. If you run out of RAM, you start swapping. On top of the normal hard drive load requirements. 7200 RPM hard drives have about 45 MB/sec constraints per single normal non raid, non solid state, non RAM drive. You eventually cap out hard drive bus bandwidth but for most modern motherboard Northbridges, that's not going to happen, even with 5 drives at ~250 total MB/sec. If so, get a 1x PCI-E card and you are set.

Anyway, when you load 1 WoW, it reads it at full blast with no swapping. Add 3 more that all need the data THEN add swapping? You will be lucky to get off the Zepp before it loads again. That ~45 MB limit is per drive and scales quite linearly with the number of drives. Add more RAM and consider adding an extra drive or two (they are cheap these days). You will see a huge improvement. Also consider cranking your settings down.Thanks Xzin, after reading that I spoke to a guy here at work that hordes PC parts. Im going to try a NAS that he has with two drives on it and put a WOW directory on each. My new RAM will come in tomorrow and I'll slap that in as well.

Thanks so much for the help and insight. :thumbup:

[Chorizotarian]

The more clients you have per harddrive the more they will fight over harddrive access. If possible spread them out a bit.

The difference between 1 harddrive hosting 4 clients and each client folder having its own harddrive is huge.

This is probably right if you create 5 copies of WoW via Ctrl-V / Ctrl-C. If you symbolically link them though (Vista mklink, XP linkd) this doesn't seem to happen. I'm running them all off 1 disk, and I don't see any disk contention issues.

If anyone wants to try it out I can provide a PowerShell script that creates a new linked copy of WoW w/ 1 command.

[BobGnarly]

Question: Are you running all the WoW instances out of the same directory, or different ones?

If you aren't already, try running it all out of a single directory. I had a very similar problem running 5 instances in 2G (with zoning on zeps), and running it all out of the same directory made it (and the city lag) MUCH better. I'm guessing the hard drive cache is the reason, but whatever it is, it was night and day for me.

[Chorizotarian]

That would have the same effect as running them from 5 linked directories, except that you'll get collisions between the video settings, saved variables, etc. between the various instances. IMO symbolic linking is the way to go.

[wendalf]

Sorry to drudge up an old thread but I am just trying to optimize my systems performance. I currently run 4 instances of WoW on one box. I have 3.0GHz dual core, 4GB RAM, 9800GTX+. I currently run all 4 instances from 1 directory. I am going to do some testing but I wanted some suggestions first.

I have 2 SATA drives in the machine so would it be optimal to run 2 instances from their own directory per hard drive? I am going to mess around with different setups and see if I can tell a difference in performance.

I currently do not have any issues really except for first entering large cities, after about 15 seconds it clears up to the point of acting like I was running a single instance of the game.