Decrease in performance after Symlinking?

Ok so I finally took the plunge and Symlinked my two wow folders.

I am getting very tired of my toons breaking follow while mounted with Crusader Aura, so I decided to take some extra steps and move my slaves folder to a different drive and then symlink it to my mains folder.

Well turns out that my toons break follow even WORSE now! WTF?

I don't understand what is going on. My latency is never more then 80ms on all 5 of my clients.

Its almost like my HD or CPU decides to do something else for like 1-2 seconds every 30-45 seconds and then fix. Well that break is enough time break my follow when my characters are moving fast.

I don't know what else to do? I run all my slaves with min graphics and maxbackground fps at 15, no sound, no music, no addons.

My main runs pretty much full graphics just no addons at all!

I run a Quad Core Q6700 with 4 Gigs of RAM on Vista 64 with an ATI Radeon 4870 with double monitor. I have the latest ATI drivers.

Is there anything that I could check that might be a problem? My HD indexing maybe? Norton Antivirus doing something or my Firewall? I've disabled Norton and tried to run but the problem still occurs.

The problem happens when I solo or MB, it doesn't matter which.

I'm so sick of Vista's shit cause my XP laptop does not have this problem at all, but I cannot MB on it.

have you specified core affinity for the copies of wow? (running them on different cores)
I have mine set to 1- for the main 2&3 for the other 4 when running a 5 box on one machine. I leave core 0 alone to run all the vista stuff

worst case - if you adopt the focusless hydra method you could make the non paladin the leader when mounted and thus avoid losing the buff

if your pc does that, it's most likely a bottleneck somewhere - a process doing something, to either harddrive or cpu.

But, fortunately, you are running Vista. Open up Task Manager (ctrl-alt-delete - start taskmanager) and under the performance tab, select "Resource Monitor" - put this on your secondary screen somewhere it's not too intrusive. Expand the cpu, memory and harddrive sections, and do a 5box mounted run though a zone you know will cause the problem. Pay attention to the file i/o load on your harddrive, and especially WHICH files are being used. Swapfile usage = drop in performance. Wow does not need to use the swapfile when playing, only when you run out of physical memory. You can see this aswell under the memory section. Also, when the break of /follow happens, see if anything is maxing out right around there.

This was how I diagnosed my setup - and ended up adding 4 extra gigs of ram, and 2 extra harddrives in a stripeset. Those 2 extra drives only contain wow, with symlinking. My fps drops and performance issues / break of follow disappeared like vapor.

Good luck.