Running 5x from 1 WoW folder, or...?

[Mendicant]

Right now I have 1 folder of WoW for my main, and 1 folder of WoW for the 4 others. Both folders are on the same harddrive. Would I see a performance increase with:

- Having only 1 folder of WoW and using that for all clients.
- Having 2 folders (as it is now), but having them on different harddrives?
- Having 5 folders (one for each) on different drives (I have 4 drives)?


Would this affect fps at all, or just load times?

[Volch0k]

You want to have 1 folder for each acc.

[phetish]

I've tried a few options -I don't have 4 HDD's so I can't test that one.


Fair - 5xFolders on one Drive - Slower zoning times, but pretty good FPS - lots of crashes in big cities
Better - 2 folders on 2 drives (one for main, on for 4 slaves)- Faster zoning - but still crashes too much in cities
Best - 5x Folders on two HDD - Faster zoning, slightly lower FPS (not sure why..) - fewer crashes in bigger cities - still crashes though
* I tried 1Folder at one time but didn't like it - can't remember why though :)
I still need to try using Junction Points but It's just a little beyond my inclination right now.

I've only got 2GB of ram on XP right now - I'll have 4GB this afternoon so I'll let you know if that changes anything when I get that installed. I suspect that my ram might be the bottleneck, but I've also ordered another MB (for overclocking) and another Hardrive (total of 3) so I'll be testing those changes too!

[Oatboat]

i use 1 folder for main on main hard drive and 1 folder for slaves on 2nd hard drive. I have 0 crashes and good loading times/fps.

[krum]

I can run all five from the same folder (although in practice I run 4 from the same computer on the slave machine). Not only that but the slave machine is pretty crappy (2.0GHz E2180 CPU @ 2.8GHz, GF6600LE video, 2GB RAM, 250GB disk, crappy Shuttle motherboard) There is no evidence to suggest that having each account in a separate folder will offer increased performance.

[Snowfox]

Ok, so i only use one folder for my accounts, one hard drive, one machine. Soon i hope to get a second machine, but for the time being i want to have 4 seperate folders. How, exactly, do i set up 4 different folders for each account?

[Mendicant]

It seems there isn't a verdict out on this yet. I actually have 2 setups-- for my shamans it's slaves using one folder, main using another folder, both on the same HD. For my new group I'm running them all on the same folder. I haven't noticed much difference, other than they want to use the same video settings. I don't have any crashes on either setup.

Has anyone done any actual tests or have any figures to show one is better than the other?

[phetish]

Has anyone done any actual tests or have any figures to show one is better than the other?Let me know what you mean by "better" - Stability? FPS? ease of setup? - and I'll test for it.

I'll be testing some different setup tonight with my new hardware and can share my experiences.

[gtheis]

I might be completely off base here, but I am pretty sure I read in another thread that sharing a folder, to an extent, is an improvement in performance due to some file/memory cacheing. Personally I use 2 folders, 1 for main and 1 for my four followy-guys. Might want to search on the topic of performance tweaking.

[Braggon]

If you use WIN XP you can use whats known as Symlinking which creates Junction links that share info between different folders.

Im not THAT familiar with it but i have it set up where using a program called WINBOLIC I can have one complete install of WoW along with two very much smaller installs of WoW.

If you search on this site for the topic Winbolic guide you'll find and excellent expalntion with the link to its download.

So instaed of having 27 gigs of game you can now have 9.9 with three seperate installs running on one PC. Worked for me.

[Otlecs]

i use 1 folder for main on main hard drive and 1 folder for slaves on 2nd hard drive. I have 0 crashes and good loading times/fps.
This is the best setup, and the one I finally settled on.

I went the "one folder per concurrent instance of WoW" route for a while, but the above approach provides quicker loading times and less maintenance.

[Lorune]

I personally run everything of 1 folder, this is on a fast Sata Drive. I also tried loading it once from my IDE storage disk however this noticable slowed down things, both loadtimes as fps.

[Anozireth]

Currently I'm running my main on a two-drive RAID-0 array (which is also where the system swap file is), and a pair of clones on each of two more drives. This seems to be optimal for my 4 drive setup. I had been running my swap file on the same drive as two of the clones, but noticed greater load lag on those two than the rest. After moving it to the RAID array, I saw a great improvement on those two with no noticeable difference on my main.

Edit: I wanted to also add, you should NEVER use more than one folder per drive due to caching. If you only have one drive, all 5 from one folder is the only way to go.

[Anozireth]

Another note, if you must have multiple folders with only one drive so your clones can run a different WoW configuration, you can use junction points or symbolic links (depending on XP or Vista respectively) to point the data folders to the same place and only have one copy of the data. The data is the bulk of the disk usage, both in terms of activity and storage, so it will save you space and speed you up.

[Nixi]

1 folder for main, [ie. d:\wow1\] and 1 folder for alts [ie. d:\wow2\] It's best if you can put them on different hard drives- Main [d:\wow1\] Alts [e:\wow2\] . I found a tremendous performance increase (and less maintainence) from going from 5 installs to only 2. My second largest jump in performance came with windows 64 bit reading all 4 gigs of my ram, then I jammed another 4 gigs for a total of 8 just to make sure ram wasn't an issue anymore. (as a side note, i plugged in two 8800 GT's for 0 performance gain and I ended up taking the 2nd video card out to build another machine.) The other benefit in going with 2 installs is that your mains folder can be used as the 'solo' play folder for all your other toons. So your keybindings and things can be more logical and orderly since you're just using one class.

Question to those that run 5 wow's from 1 drive. How do you deal with the sound setting? I want my 4 alts to have the sound off and my main to have the sound on, when I run 5 copies from 1 directory the sound settings will someitmes get screwed up. I think it has to do with the last copy of wow that I close and it saves the setting, but it's annoying to constantly have to readjust that.

[puppychow]

I have five wow folders, \wow1 - \wow5. Wow1 is the only "real" install, all the rest are junction'd off \wow1. One thing I did was NOT junction the WTF folder, but instead the WTF\Account folder. That gives each Wow folder its own wtf\config.wtf, which lets me give each one different video, audio, etc settings and they stick.

The script I use (XP, not sure about Vista) to create extra wow dirs is pretty simple and copied from a script previously posted here:



@echo off
set MYDIR=%1
mkdir %MYDIR%
FOR /f %%I IN ('dir /b /a:-d wow1') DO (
echo %%I
fsutil hardlink create %MYDIR%\%%I wow1\%%I
)
junction %MYDIR%\Cache wow1\Cache
junction %MYDIR%\Data wow1\Data
junction %MYDIR%\Errors wow1\Errors
junction %MYDIR%\Logs wow1\Logs
junction %MYDIR%\Patches wow1\Patches
junction %MYDIR%\Screenshots wow1\Screenshots
junction %MYDIR%\Fonts wow1\Fonts
mkdir WTF
junction %MYDIR%\WTF\Account wow1\WTF\Account
mkdir %MYDIR%\Interface
mkdir %MYDIR%\Interface\AddOns
junction %MYDIR%\Interface\AddOns wow1\Interface\AddOns


Run this from the root of the drive you are creating new wow's in (or change all the wow1\ to c:\wow1\ or whatever).

One thing to be extra careful for when doing this though is never, ever, ever delete a file inside any of the wow2, wow3, etc folders. it WILL delete the wow1 equivalent! I accidently deleted my Addons folder once and didn't realize it, fortunately I had made a backup the night before.

[Narezza]

I had originally made 5 separate directories for my 5 accounts, but I'm new at this and had a very frustrating time getting the settings and macros set for each account. So, Im now running everything from one account and having a much better time. Im not noticing any memory problems or a slowdown of any type.

I guess it depends on how beefy the computer is. If you've got a big enough pipe, then you should be able to run it all from one directory without any problems. If you cant, or experience some slowdown or crashes, then put them in separate directories and link them.

[Meathead]

I run my wow all in 1 folder 60 frames everywere but only on ok graphics my 4870 is kinda lagging :( but all in all its still good