Inquiry about multi-instancing and lag

Hey guys, first post here. First I must say what an excellent site!

Second, I have been diligently reading all the guides here on the site before deciding to ask any questions that would appear to be redundant. I have no experience of multi-boxing except for being curious the other day, when I decided to open two instances of Wow, one is my wife's toon. She needed some low lvl gear so I ran her through some instances. Basically, all I did was alt tab then set her on autofollow, then alt tab back to my main. Then I thought, there has to be a better way. Long story short I ended up here at this great site.

One thing I noticed was she would not stay on follow. She would lag behind almost always. I began to wonder if it was because her instance of the game was minimized therefore less resources were going to that program resulting in lag.

My current pc specs are old (athlon64 3000+) and my framerate with the second instance was low. I will be building a new computer to play both WoW and WAR and would like to multi-instance. So my questions are two-fold.

1) To multi-instance effectively do you recommend quad core cpu's? So you can allocate each instance to a specific core?
2) Do the toons on autofollow lag behind because they are just another instance running on the same machine as your main and to increase connectivity one would have to have the other instances running on a separate machine?

The reason I ask is because it will be more convenient for me to have just multiple instances instead of multiple pc's. I do have two pc's but one is my wife's which can run wow easily but my computer desk is behind hers (basically I can't see her monitor). Therefore I didn't think it would be a viable option to stand up and walk around and peer over to see her monitor just to check on my other toon. I would only include her computer if it is the only way to avoid the lag which I mentioned earlier. I want to clarify if other multi-instancing folks have any lag problems. I run DSL and split the connection via router. My ping in most FPS games are around 40-90 and 150ish in WoW, depending on server.

side note:
I have a total of three monitors at my disposal, so I may set one up solely for this purpose.
I only plan to dual-instance at first until I get the handle of things.

Heya - welcome to the site :)

I'll have a pop at answering a few of your questions.

1) I don't run a quad core setup myself (3 machines instead), but given the chance it's the way I would go. Having everything on one box makes switching chars on deaths a lot simpler, and it helps with a lot of the setup.
Yes you can allocate WoW instances to individual cores. The client supports this natively I believe.


2) Lag - I do find that my toons appear different on each wow instance in relation to each other. Not much, but its funny sometimes. They don't usually stop though. Is this just when running about, or after combat? (as the follow will stop after combat and needs restarting)

I would advise setting the fps and graphics settings down to their minimum setting on the alt wow instance. That should help quite a bit.

My slave PC is I think the same as yours (A64 3000+). I didn't fancy running more than one WoW on it as the first one is a bit clunky, but there's not a great deal of RAM in the box (1GB I think). How much RAM are you packing in your machine, as that helps greatly with the performance as it avoids the client having to go to disk all the time swapping memory in and out.


Hope that helps - have fun with the boxing experiment. Speaking as someone who dualboxed with existing toons to start with, while that's fun, you should give some new identical toons a try out - that's a whole new blast :) (and might have you getting more accounts pretty soon :D)

1) You don't need a quad-core processor to multibox, however, the least I would use is a dual-core processor with 2GB RAM even for minimal dual-boxing, but a dual-core can also quad-box just fine, in my personal experience. You can use multiple computers and link them together through software or hardware. I have tried dual-boxing with 2 GB of Ram on a Single Processor, but I did not have much luck, and experienced several problems.

Using Processor Affinity, you can apply certain WoW directories to certain processors.

2) The problem with auto-follow, in my personal experience, has had to due with what kind of set up I was using in terms of a computer. I had a problem of losing my fourth character all the time when I quad-boxed with 2GB of RAM. When I upgraded to 4 GB and bought a new video card, I no longer had that problem. And again, I've five-boxed with five simple 1gb single core Dell "Back to School" computers, and didn't have the problem.

Grab a quad core CPU, it makes a lot more sense to proof up for the future ;-)

4GB RAM and an 8800GT is what we generally recommend for 5 boxing on a single machine.

Setup your main so his instance is on cores 0 and 2, then setup the alts so they are on cores 1 and 3.

Regards.

Thanks for the tips, I will stop back in and update everyone on how things are going.

My machine has 2gb of ram.

The second toon would just lag too far behind and then after a certain distance would just stop following altogether, without ever entering combat. I think its that my machine is poor.

Once I get my new machine built I will give an update, thanks!

Quote:

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Originally Posted by 'Wilbur',index.php?page=Thread&postID=83134#post83 134

Grab a quad core CPU, it makes a lot more sense to proof up for the future ;-)

4GB RAM and an 8800GT is what we generally recommend for 5 boxing on a single machine.

Setup your main so his instance is on cores 0 and 2, then setup the alts so they are on cores 1 and 3.

Regards.

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Note: If you have the first gen quad (ala Q6600 you want to keep the instances on the pairs of cores, 0 and 1 and 2 and 3 respectively. The early quad cores were really just double dual cores, and each of the core pairs communicates better between themselves than with the other pair.

I have my main instance on 0,1 and all of the 4 alts on 2,3.

In my expierence with the whole package,
building my computers to overclocking them

1) To multi-instance effectively do you recommend quad core cpu's? So you can allocate each instance to a specific core? I am running 3 in Shatt and IF common area with 40 to 50 fps. The main is maxed out resolution of 1920x1200 and highest settings, bit color. The slaves are in little boxes to the right at 800x600 lowest settings same color though.
Actually from what i have heard, WoW doesn't have code within the program to fully optimize four cores like how your have describe. While this is true in games like Crysis and CoD4, WoW is a little behind. Four cores will help load times, process characters and spells quicker, But all this is achievable by Overclocking your CPU if its dual core. Speaking from expierence i have my E6750 overclocked to 3.504 Ghz on games and full loads. As for WoW's code, thats on their end nothing you can really do to change that.

2) Do the toons on autofollow lag behind because they are just another instance running on the same machine as your main and to increase connectivity one would have to have the other instances running on a separate machine? I saw a nifty little trick on Warcraftmovies.com the other day from Swifty the infamous warrior and all his bag of tricks. He has a registry tweak that keeps your ms at 115. I have not yet to try it but i would assume thats what you would need. Why the lag then? Either 2 things, A. Check your internet speed (best determined by ms, if its greater then 250 its your internet) B. Check your fps on full load with 2 wows going, if your fps with everything up is below 20, its your cpu. Fix one or the other and your golden.

3 rogues tri-box perfectly avg ~45-55fps 185ms
24" display 1920x1200 resolution
e6750 at 3.504
2gb ram vista 32bit (only 64bit vista reads 2gb+ ram!)
8800gt, a little overclocked not much (came superclocked)

My system without the monitor goes for around 600 dollars today, its not expensive anymore. So it should be easy to find parts equal to these for cheap

Quote:

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Originally Posted by 'daviddoran',index.php?page=Thread&postID=83288#po st83288

(ala Q6600 you want to keep the instances on the pairs of cores, 0 and 1 and 2 and 3 respectively)

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I'm pretty sure its 0&2, 1&3 that are the pairs.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by 'Chaosomega',index.php?page=Thread&postID=83372#po st83372

2gb ram vista 32bit (only 64bit vista reads 2gb+ ram!)

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64 Bit OS's read Over 3.25GB of RAM.

32 bit OS's dont.

It also doesn't matter if its Vista or any other OS under then sun :P