Hardware question!

[chazz]

Hey everyone!

Not sure if this is the right section but I'm taking a chance.
I just started quad-boxing 4 shamans tonight after seeing it being done in AV and thengot the link here from that guy.
The idea of it is something I've been wanting to do since way back in the day when I played Anarchy Online and in FFXI I actually tried doing it by using a certain software made for that game which created hooks and classes to use for programming smaller things for it (people mainly did botting but I never were into cheating, I always just wanted to control more characters), but never got anywhere since I'm no programmer by heart and because everyone who had the talent thought my idea sucked.
At this point in time as far as I knew software solutions for multi-boxing didn't exist, but I heard of people later in DaoC who did it using several computers etc and that was never an option for me.
Well, enough with the prologue, now it does exist and I'm in love! :love:

I first set everything up for three new accounts because the store had some trouble with the fourth one so it took an hour extra or so before I got it (buying keys online) and without actually thinking about it I had three instances of WoW running with all details etc on the highest level... and it worked, smoothly aswell!
But then when I got the fourth instance the fps dropped immensely and I really feel the lag, especially when I went to Orgrimmar just a few minutes ago, it felt like I was back on my old station where everything would freeze for a second or so time and time again.
So I went out and pressed ctrl+alt+del to check my CPU usage and found out it was only using 50%, so that clearly wasn't the problem.
Now I don't know how to check GPU usage, but the memory was at about 95% or more, using 1.8GB of 2GB.
Is it fair to just assume memory is the problem here and that another 1GB stick will solve it?
I don't know if memory has effect on fps? Always kind of thought that was GPU and nothing else.
I lowered the resolution on my slaves and set all graphic options to low except for terrain distance and it basically had no effect at all, I mean I think I noticed a sliiiiiiiight improvement but it was so slight that who really knows...
So that really got me convinced it's the memory, but I don't want to spend money before I've heard some more opinions on the matter, especially if someone knowledgable has input to offer, because I'm a poor student and just running these four accounts forces me to sacrifice some things each month.

I'm running a QuadCore 6600, 8800 GTX nVidia and 2GB DDR2 memory.
My main character is set on 1680x1050 resolution and everything on high while my slaves run everything on low and 1280x720 resolution.

Long post, but I cincerely thank anyone who takes the time to read and respond!

[nogbog]

Sounds to me like a harddisk problem,
Well... not so much a problem, but you cannot run that many WoW instances off the same harddisk without expecting a ton of lag.

[Freddie]

Chazz, two things. First, cpu affinity. I don't know if this is true, but people on the WoW forums say that by default, WoW runs only on cores 0 and 1 of a quad core. That would be consistent with the 50% cpu use you're seeing. So the first thing to try is setting the cpu affnity manually so your WoWs use different cores. You can do that from the Processes tab in Task Manager or with many of the boxing programs that people talk about here including my own.

Second, it sounds like your problem is not enough memory. When a PC runs out of RAM it begins to page. That means it begins shuffling info back and forth from RAM to the hard disk. When that happens, you notice a sudden sharp drop in performance and stuttering in games. RAM is cheap now, and you can't go wrong by going up to 4 gigs.

[Kissell13]

Sounds to me like a harddisk problem,
Well... not so much a problem, but you cannot run that many WoW instances off the same harddisk without expecting a ton of lag.Actually I run all 5 instances of wow off of a single sata hdd.
Two physical installs, 1 for main and the other for the alts(run 4 times from the same dir

I have no problems with lag.

[chazz]

Yeah it's not a HDD problem, I run main on raptor (10k rpm) and slaves on a regular (7200 rpm?) and I've tried putting one and two slaves on the raptor aswell to ease it up for my regular HDD, makes no difference.
Also yes I have set up cpu affinity using KeyClone, didn't know about the 0 and 2 cores only so maybe I should change that for two of my instances.

But alright so I'm probably not wrong assuming memory then?
Probably going to buy some more either way, but from what I understand buying more than 1GB more (3GB total) is a waste if I'm not running Vista 64-bit? Cause I'm running Vista 32-bit.

[nogbog]

Sounds to me like a harddisk problem,
Well... not so much a problem, but you cannot run that many WoW instances off the same harddisk without expecting a ton of lag.Actually I run all 5 instances of wow off of a single sata hdd.
Two physical installs, 1 for main and the other for the alts(run 4 times from the same dir

I have no problems with lag.Wait till you start running out of disk space!

When i'm down to my last 15Gb of my 200Gb disk, things start to get super choppy.

[Kissell13]

Wait till you start running out of disk space!

When i'm down to my last 15Gb of my 200Gb disk, things start to get super choppy.
OIC. I shouldnt have that problem hopefully. I have a separate 500gb drive just for game installs. Currently I only have wow and 3 others installed. So I should be good to go.

[Freddie]

Also yes I have set up cpu affinity using KeyClone, didn't know about the 0 and 2 cores only so maybe I should change that for two of my instances.
What did you set them to? You need to assign the different instances of WoW to different cores. You could assign the first two WoWs to 0 and 1, and the last two WoWs to 2 and 3. Or assign each WoW to a separate core.


But alright so I'm probably not wrong assuming memory then?
That's my first guess but you won't know till you try.


Probably going to buy some more either way, but from what I understand buying more than 1GB more (3GB total) is a waste if I'm not running Vista 64-bit? Cause I'm running Vista 32-bit.
A 32-bit OS can't use the full four gigs but it may be able to use more than three. The exact amount depends on drivers, the amount of video ram on your video card, etc. (The higher your video ram, the less system ram will be usable.) For example the PC I'm using now is running 32 bit XP with 4 gigs of system RAM, and the OS can see 3582 MB of that RAM. 4 gigs is 4096 MB so I'm getting use of 510 MB of the last gig or about half of it.

[chazz]

What did you set them to? You need to assign the different instances of WoW to different cores. You could assign the first two WoWs to 0 and 1, and the last two WoWs to 2 and 3. Or assign each WoW to a separate core.

A 32-bit OS can't use the full four gigs but it may be able to use more than three. The exact amount depends on drivers, the amount of video ram on your video card, etc. (The higher your video ram, the less system ram will be usable.) For example the PC I'm using now is running 32 bit XP with 4 gigs of system RAM, and the OS can see 3582 MB of that RAM. 4 gigs is 4096 MB so I'm getting use of 510 MB of the last gig or about half of it.I set all my WoW instances on different CPU, the main on 0 and then the others on 1, 2 and 3 respectively.
So the higher my video card ram the lower 'regular' RAM will be used? My graphics card is 756 I believe (unless I'm talking about something else, not really too bright when it comes to details like this on hardware).
Anyway, I'll check just how cheap it is and if it's cheap enough I'll buy 2GB on Thursday and see if that fixes my problem!

[Freddie]

I set all my WoW instances on different CPU, the main on 0 and then the others on 1, 2 and 3 respectively.
Sounds good. Maybe somebody tested different combo's and there's something else that works even better -- I don't know -- but that sounds reasonable.

So the higher my video card ram the lower 'regular' RAM will be used? My graphics card is 756 I believe (unless I'm talking about something else, not really too bright when it comes to details like this on hardware).
That's right. Each piece of memory (whether regular RAM or memory on a video card) needs to have a unique ID number so Windows can talk to it. Sort of like phone numbers. With 32-bit numbers, you can only count up to a little more than 4 billion. So that's the maximum number of pieces of memory the OS can talk to. Every byte of memory on your video card uses up one of those numbers, so there are fewer numbers available for regular RAM.


Anyway, I'll check just how cheap it is and if it's cheap enough I'll buy 2GB on Thursday and see if that fixes my problem!
That's what I would do too. Good luck.

[chazz]

Alrighty then, I just got home from the PC-store, bought myself 4GB brand new memory and threw the old 2GB out (slower).
Result? Nothing.
Obviously only 50-60% of memory is used now, but it had no effect on my fps at all.
I can open up three instances of wow and run it with 60fps capped at all times basically (maybe not in towns of course, only tried outside, but still) and then when the fourth comes up it drops down to 35 or so and begins to feel choppy/stuttering.
I've set all graphics on my slave on the lowest possible with NO impact AT ALL, I've bought more RAM (4Gb total), I've divided my WoW instances on two HDDs one of them being a 10k rpm raptor and still this happens.
I have no idea what this can be. ?(

To once again state my hardware;
QuadCore 6600
nVidia 8800GTX
DDR2 PC-6400 (800MHz) 4 GB
Raptor 10000 rpm 74GB
Maxtor 7200 rpm 250GB

3 Slaves with all graphics on LOWEST and resolution 1280x720
1 Main with all graphics on High and resolution 1680x1050
Main+Slave1 on Raptor, Slave2+Slave3 on Maxtor

I also have 24mbit connection and noticed how my ms also goes from 40-60 to 200ish when four instances is up (obviously more WoW instances mean a lot more info trafficking, I just thought 150+ ms was quite a hefty amount).

Anyone have any ideas at all?
Oh and also a big thanks Freddie for taking the time to read my posts and try to help me out, noticed I never did thank you. ;)

[Freddie]

Oh and also a big thanks Freddie for taking the time to read my posts and try to help me out, noticed I never did thank you. ;)
You're welcome but I haven't managed to help so ... :(

How much memory is usable now? I don't have Vista but according to Microsoft's doc's, you can tell by running msinfo32 from the "run" box. You should also be able to tell from TaskManager.

Hmmm. The PC is suddenly running out of something when you launch the fourth WoW, but what? You might be able to tell by comparing TaskManager with three and four WoWs. If you can figure out how to decipher TaskManager's display you can tell when and how much the system begins to page. Paging causes an enormous performance hit.

If you've got broadband and a decent router, it seems unlikely that you're running out of bandwidth. Video memory? Maybe the PC suddenly has to start shuffling graphics back and forth from video memory to system RAM. That's pretty slow. There must be people here with your video card and 4 wow's would could tell you if that's typical.

Well, four ideas.

(1) Try setting cpu affinity so each WoW can run on all four cores. That way Windows is free to schedule them as optimally as possible. When you assign an app to just one core, you prevent Windows from doing things as efficiently as possible. Windows doesn't really schedule app's to cores. It schedules their threads to cores and the scheduling can change from one instant to another.

(2) Try capping the fps of three WoWs to see if that frees up resources. I think the command is /console maxbkfps ##.

(3) Try turning off some Vista background stuff. I don't have Vista so I can't say exactly what but there's info all over the web about that.

(4) Do you have any of the WoW windows open but completely covered by another window? That makes the covered WoW's cpu usage triple.

[Freddie]

P.S. You might want to check the cpu affinity with TaskManager to see if it's really set the way you want.

[chazz]

How much memory is usable now? I don't have Vista but according to Microsoft's doc's, you can tell by running msinfo32 from the "run" box. You should also be able to tell from TaskManager.
3189, so I didn't get much worth from that last 1GB but then again it can never hurt (and I got it cheaper aswell, bargained with the guy hehe).

Anyway, I always saw 50% usage of my CPU as a good thing, I thought "well it's a beast, appearantly that's all it needs to use for this" rather than going "oh it might not be using all of its potential power", so when you were talking about affinity I thought "well clearly it isn't the CPU", then shazam! and it hit me to think the other way.
All said and done I checked the cores through Task Manager (never looked at the cores individually there before, was obsessed with the usage percentage) and voilá; it only used two cores to 100%, thus 50% of its full potential.
Now, I've set the CPU affinity through KeyClone so obviously it doesn't work properly with that software, so I did it manually through Task Manager and now it uses all 4 cores to 100%, thus 100% usage.
Result? 50fps smooth as silk, with few drops here and there.
But I was able to go into orgrimmar now with all my slaves and the picture didn't freeze once, before I had to stop every 10metres or so because the image froze and if I continue to walk I'd lose my slaves.
Now I have 20-30 fps in crowded area such as outside the bank in orgrimmar. It still takes quite a while for all the players to render (I see only shadows for a while) but at least I can run through now without problems.

So my plan now, after I've grabbed myself some mexican food, is to play around with the slaves graphics etc, and my own, to see if it at all affects the fps (they stutter while walking sometimes, especially in town, I don't lose them but could look prettier :P) and tweak a bit.
To answer your questions or ideas anyway; I had already set CPU affinity through KeyClone but appearantly it doesn't work, I have set maxfpsbk to 10 for all my slaves since before, no window is above another one (the slaves are minimized windows), and as for Vista I have the second highest settings, I don't need the fancy see-through windows etc but I want the Vista interface as I hated XPs look and hate the older ones even more.


So two last questions then I guess;
I still have 200 ms though it seems, so I dunno what that's all about, I still think 150+ ms is too much to be concidered a 'normal' raise from three more clients. Any ideas?
And is there any way to set the CPU affinity for my WoW instances without doing it through Task Manager each time I want to play? Cause it appearantly doesn't remember the settings and KeyClone doesn't work for the job.

[Freddie]

...so when you were talking about affinity I thought "well clearly it isn't the CPU", then shazam! and it hit me to think the other way.
Woot! I'm glad I kept mentioning it. Now you can see why the first thing I said, way at the top, was that 50% CPU use is consistent with WoW's default setting (it apparently sets itself) to restrict itself to two cores. For practical purposes, because of WoW's default settings, your quad core was turning into a dual core.

One good thing is, we learned that three WoWs can run full speed on two cores, so I guess the full chip is good for six. :)


Result? 50fps smooth as silk, with few drops here and there.
Excellent. :)


So my plan now, after I've grabbed myself some mexican food...
Sounds good, I'm gonna get some lunch too.


I still have 200 ms though it seems, so I dunno what that's all about, I still think 150+ ms is too much to be concidered a 'normal' raise from three more clients. Any ideas?
What is that number exactly? A ping time? How are you measuring it? If it's a WoW thing you might have to explain because I don't play WoW although I have an account.


And is there any way to set the CPU affinity for my WoW instances without doing it through Task Manager each time I want to play? Cause it appearantly doesn't remember the settings and KeyClone doesn't work for the job.
There might be a setting for it in WoW's config file. I'll look later. In the meantime there are lots of free programs that will set the affinity each time you launch WoW including my own, HotkeyNet. If you do it with HotkeyNet, you make a hotkey like the following. I'll use F1 in the example but HKN can make use of a bazillion key combo's:



<Hotkey F1>
<TargetWindow wow1>
<SetAffinity all>
<TargetWindow wow2>
<SetAffinity all>
etc.

[Freddie]

P.S. Here some info about setting affinity with HotkeyNet.

SetAffinity (http://www.hotkeynet.com/ref/setaffinity.html)

[chazz]

Woot! I'm glad I kept mentioning it. Now you can see why the first thing I said, way at the top, was that 50% CPU use is consistent with WoW's default setting (it apparently sets itself) to restrict itself to two cores. For practical purposes, because of WoW's default settings, your quad core was turning into a dual core.

One good thing is, we learned that three WoWs can run full speed on two cores, so I guess the full chip is good for six. :)
So am I! ;)
And yeah I guess in terms of CPU a Q6600 can handle that many. :)



What is that number exactly? A ping time? How are you measuring it? If it's a WoW thing you might have to explain because I don't play WoW although I have an account. Yes, it's ping.
I'm using an AddOn for WoW to display my ping.
When playing solo (one instance of WoW) I'm getting 40-60 ping, but when firing up all four I get 200+ most of the time, now obviously running more instances of wow puts more strain on the bandwith, but I have a 24mbit line and have been hosting LANs for friends before where we played other games and where I would usually have say 5-10 ping we all had 10-15, so a small increase, but here it's jumping up 150+ in ping which to me just seems a bit much.
Obviously WoW is an entirely different game and more complex I'm sure but yeah, I just thought it was a bit much and hoped for a solution when I would solve the fps problem, but the ping problem still remains.



There might be a setting for it in WoW's config file. I'll look later. In the meantime there are lots of free programs that will set the affinity each time you launch WoW including my own, HotkeyNet. If you do it with HotkeyNet, you make a hotkey like the following. I'll use F1 in the example but HKN can make use of a bazillion key combo's:



<Hotkey F1>
<TargetWindow wow1>
<SetAffinity all>
<TargetWindow wow2>
<SetAffinity all>
etc.
Thanks a bunch mate, using your software now, it's wonderful! :)

Took my time with the food and watched a few shows (conan & jay leno, funny stuff) so I'm going to head back to these 'issues' now and play around, see how much I can juice the graphic settings, where I can gain fps and why, and first on my list is seeing if using one core per instance is better than using all for all instances, now that I finally truly understand what you've been saying all along. :thumbsup:
Something I found interesting is how I noticed that 50fps was my limit and it doesn't stay capped at all times, even when out of cities, whereas a guy on the forums with basically same rig as I have supposedly runs it with 60 capped, maybe I should ask him a few questions and hope he's nice enough to respond. :)

[Freddie]

[Thanks a bunch mate, using your software now, it's wonderful! :)
Thanks a lot. :)


I'm using an AddOn for WoW to display my ping.
When playing solo (one instance of WoW) I'm getting 40-60 ping, but when firing up all four I get 200+ most of the time, now obviously running more instances of wow puts more strain on the bandwith, but I have a 24mbit line and have been hosting LANs for friends before where we played other games and where I would usually have say 5-10 ping we all had 10-15, so a small increase, but here it's jumping up 150+ in ping which to me just seems a bit much.
My guess is the Nagle algorithm is kicking in. Hopefully it's kicking in at your end and not Blizzard's server. With XP you can disable Nagle in the registry. I don't know how to do it with Vista but you can probably Google it.

Actually Nagle is my only guess. It fits the profile perfectly of suddenly bumping times from 50ish to 150ish, because it's whole purpose is to delay transmissions for up to 200 ms under certain circumstances.

I just googled a little bit and found this nice article:

http://thecowmoos.blogspot.com/2008/01/improving-your-world-of-warcraft-ping.html

And here's a thread about Nagle in WoW -- apparently Blizzard tried to disable it -- maybe they put it back in ?

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html;jsessionid=6048DE62F9CF5E319A7FEC4BFD0 35CC0.app01_08?topicId=3773314912&sid=1


a guy on the forums with basically same rig as I have supposedly runs it with 60 capped, maybe I should ask him a few questions and hope he's nice enough to respond. :)
Sounds like a good idea.

[chazz]

Ah yeah, I've done that change in the registry already in hopes of improvement, can't really say if it improved a little bit or not, sometimes the ping has gone down to 120, but most of the time it's at around 200.

On another note for anyone interested, I did some testing now and came to the following conclusions;
- Running each instance on each core or running them all on all cores makes no difference, nor does it to divide them.
- My graphics options has NO IMPACT on my fps? By this I mean on my slaves.. I can run all four slaves now on highest settings, 1680x1050 resolution and cap fps off at 50 even while in the background and it makes no difference for my main instance.
The sad part about this is that I cannot seem to do anything to juice the fps on my main up to a steady 60, instead I have to settle for capping it off at 50 and still have it drop down tp 45ish sometimes and to 20-30 in orgrimmar (12 even at one brief point).
The good part about it in theory is that I can run all my slaves on the same options as my main which would make switching over to a slave much easier, especially considering PvP play later on, but I say in theory because I don't use Maximizer due to the fact that just playing in windowed mode alone makes me lose a ton of fps and always have (has nothing to do with several instances of wow in other words), don't know how I'll deal with this later when PvP becomes more of a reality.

Anyway I guess I should be happy for having 50 fps alot of the time and a much more smoother experience now, but it still bugs me alot that something is going nuts over running several instances of the game.

[Freddie]

Ah yeah, I've done that change in the registry already in hopes of improvement, can't really say if it improved a little bit or not, sometimes the ping has gone down to 120, but most of the time it's at around 200.
My guess is, we've got a replay of affinity here. I think probably Nagle isn't really turned off even though you took steps to turn it off. It just sounds too exactly like Nagle -- the sudden drastic drop to the 150ish range.


I don't use Maximizer due to the fact that just playing in windowed mode alone makes me lose a ton of fps and always have (has nothing to do with several instances of wow in other words), don't know how I'll deal with this later when PvP becomes more of a reality
So how are your windows arranged now? One is full screen and the others...?

[chazz]

My guess is, we've got a replay of affinity here. I think probably Nagle isn't really turned off even though you took steps to turn it off. It just sounds too exactly like Nagle -- the sudden drastic drop to the 150ish range.
One thing that I've noticed a couple of times before and just remembered (because before I wasn't looking for it, but I now remember that it was something I reacted briefly on) is that when I log in, it first says I have 1k fps and 0ms becuase it takes a short while for the AddOn to adjust I imagine, but then it goes to 61ms and stays there for a short amount of time and then shazam! we're up to 150-200, sometimes more.
So it's literally like it's something that kicks in a short while after I log in.


So how are your windows arranged now? One is full screen and the others...? The others are just minimized, I never switch over to them basically, and if I do I alt+tab to do it since the PiP thing doesn't work when one screen is in fullscreen (sadly, that would have been truly awesome, but can't see how that could be achieved).
This is getting creepy though, before I read your post just now I fired all of my instances up (all on highest graphics) logged on and set maxfps to 60 and voilá it stayed there fairly well, I ran into crossroads and it dropped down to 57 while rendering the NPCs (empty of players atm cause it's 2am here).
I decided to open my main back up again before writing that here and hitting "Submit" and when I did it now bounces between 30-53.
This is starting to become one of those things where I try my damnest to solve it and it ends up with me bald and the biggest dent on my forehead from banging it into the wall repeadetly, all the while I drag people down with me. :wacko:


EDIT: You know what, as far as FPS issue goes I'm just going to play for a few days or so now and do some monitoring and see how it pans out.
The recent spike just now might have been because of automatic defragmation or similiar that I just googled on and read happens in Vista at about 2am, which was almost the time (2:26 now) when it occured.
As for the ping issue I have no idea, I'll do some research and see if I can come up with something, if anyone else has any suggestions please don't hesitate to post!

And thanks once again Freddie for helping me, really appreciate it!

[chazz]

Small update!
Looks like you were right, once again, Freddie! ;)
It was a nagle issue and a recurring 'CPU situation', appearantly you can't take manual steps to fix this in the registry, the change has no effect.
I found a patch to download and install though and also created a .reg file for TcpNoDelay thing, don't know if that really works then either but did it anyway.
Result? The following;

http://pici.se/pictures/gRlUzhXqq.jpg

[Freddie]

Looks like you were right, once again, Freddie! ;)
Holy smokes, I got lucky twice in one thread! :)


It was a nagle issue and a recurring 'CPU situation', appearantly you can't take manual steps to fix this in the registry, the change has no effect.
I found a patch to download and install though and also created a .reg file for TcpNoDelay thing, don't know if that really works then either but did it anyway.
Could you say where you got the patch? I'd like to know so I can tell other people.


Result? The following;
Woot. That's awesome. I'm glad this long thread worked out so well.

I was wondering about the registry advice in those links because I thought probably WoW was requesting Nagle in its client, and I thought it would be odd if Windows allows a system-wide registry setting to override an applications choice, especially since that part of the Windows API (net communications stuff) is incredibly technical and it's used by specialists who write incredibly sophisticated server software and I couldn't imagine that Microsoft would take away control over Nagle from them and put it in the registry. And based on what you've observed, I guess they didn't. :)

[chazz]

Could you say where you got the patch? I'd like to know so I can tell other people.Absolutely!

http://thehotfixshare.net/board/index.php?showtopic=3265

And the registry file created;

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\MSMQ]

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\MSMQ\Paramet ers]
"TCPNoDelay"=dword:00000001

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\MSMQ\Paramet ers\OCMsetup]

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\MSMQ\Paramet ers\Security]
"SecureDSCommunication"=dword:00000000

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\MSMQ\Paramet ers\setup]

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\MSMQ\Setup]

Now I "just" need to try and solve my last problem and I'm golden, but I'll probably make a more appropriate thread for it!