Howto: Increase multiboxing loading times on single computer. Up to 300-800% faster loading times.

When I originally looked at Symbolic Links, I could not get the Script to work.
In the same thread, another user recommended that program on that site.

As far as creating the links and such, it worked fine for me.
I did have to download a couple of files from the microsoft site, as recommended on that site.

Twice I had patching issues with the SymLink, and have actually gone back to one install.
The symlink was a slight boost for me, which was nice, but two reinstalls sucked.

The first time I patched, but did not break the SymLinks and 4 copies would not patch.
Copying the entire patched folder over the four that would not patch broke the game somehow.

The second time, I broke the symlinks and patched the first install.
Then created new symlinks from the patched folder.
I got a red error message on all accounts at that point, which would not let me enter my username or password.

Aside from patching issues, the symlink was good.
The site above is good anyway, or was about a year ago.

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Originally Posted by sixzandsevenz

Trying to do this, I already deleted the clones folders, when I right click the data folder, I don't see a "pick link source".

Please help.

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You got both required files from the site? You need to install both the listed files :

Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista, Windows 7 - Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 SP1 Redistributable Package (x86) and the Link Shell Extension 32bit Version

Windows XP64, Windows Vista64, Windows 7 64bit - Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 SP1 Redistributable Package (x64) and the Link Shell Extension 64bit Version

Windows Itanium, Windows 7 Itanium - Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 SP1 Redistributable and Package (IA64) and the Link Shell Extension Itanium Version

Windows NT4 just needs the the Link Shell Extension NT4 Version

How in the hell, with that rig, with a raid 0 setup with those hard drives, does it take 37 seconds to load Dalaran?

My PC has about half that juice, with a single SATA drive, and it takes about 10 seconds...

Still, I guess I could reduce it to 3 seconds with your fix :)

I have five wow folders all symlinked off the one main folder.

Works well until you need to patch. Then it can be a pain in the arse.

Easiest way to do it, is to Patch the main folder, copy it, delete the data, WTF, etc folders and paste yourself four clean wow folders.

Copy the WTF & WDB folders from your drone accounts and paste them into each folder. Then symlink the data folder from the main into each drone folder. Personally, I symlink the interface folder also, I just think its cleaner.

This does work well. My loading times are very, very quick.

I like it just because its clean as....

Using my RiData SSD I load 5 clients of Dalaran in about 3 seconds.

You don't need raid 0 fast hard drives, you don't need striped SSDs, you just need a relatively cheap version (Intel is probably overkill) that has fast read times. Only put WoW (or other games that only read with minimal writing) and you'll be dandy.

hmm, I run all 5x copies of wow from one directory.
I don't have any special key bindings on any of my alts so there was no need for the multiple copies of wow. I use an SSD for my games so my loads times very quick there too.

There seems to be a bit on confusion here.

When you symlink your wow folders (except you exclude your /interface and /wtf directories), you should get the exact same performance as though you were running mulitple copies from the same executable. Because that's exactly what you are doing, it's just that you don't see it that way on the front end. But it works this way because that's exactly what the back end (behind the OS) sees. A symlink isn't much more than a shortcut that your OS knows how to work with.

As for the performace you can gain by doing this - it's really going to depend on your hard drive. (How full is it? How much Cache? What's the spindle rate?) It's still not going to be as quick as just loading 1 copy of WoW - even though they are linked and at least partially cached, you still need to load parts of the file into memory 5x times.


So why symlink at all?

Short version is that you get both the benifits of seperate installs and running from the same folder at the same time. The downside is the maintenence you need to do to maintain the symlink on patch day.

It's faster and takes up less space than having multiple installs in seperate folders - even if you have them all on seperate drives. (You can read the same file 5x times quicker that you can read 5x seperate files - even if they are all on seperate hard drives.)

But unlike simply running the same executable 5x times you can keep seperate hard copies of any files that you may want. I'm still not totally sold on why you would want to have 5x seperate /interface directories, but you can do it if you want to (Do some addons cause problems attempting to write back to the same file at the same time?) I'm also not sold on the need for seperate /WTF directories. Nothing should cause overwrite errors when you run from 1 source because every seperate account gets its own directory within the /WTF folder.

So if we don't really need seperate /WTF folders and we don't need seperate /interface folders - then there really is no point to symlinking at all - just run the same executable five times. Maybe I'm spoiled by keyclone a bit here because keyclone will remember the display settings and usernames of the different accounts for me. I guess not everyone does that though.

If you aren't sold on the idea of doing this with a 3rd party program, you can do this all from the command line yourself. Check out this thread http://www.dual-boxing.com/showthread.php?t=23398 or this one http://www.dual-boxing.com/showthrea...6229#post56229

Thoughts? Discuss please - I'll still fully admit that I'm still new to this.

I have to agree with jak3676 about the confusion thing. It's amazing to me how many people use multiple folders, and symlink them, because they think they are going to get better performance than using a single folder. When I ask someone why they want to use multiple folders and they tell me it's for performance reasons, I know there's serious misinformation going around (not that I had any question whether there was or not).

The sole reason to use multiple folders is to use different configurations, NOT for performance. You're symlinking to achieve the performance (and ease of patching?) of a single folder. And depending on the multiboxing solution you are using, you don't need multiple folders to use different configurations.

That said, if you want the benefit of different configurations, and are not using a solution that provides different configurations without using multiple folders, THEN this method is a good way to mitigate the performance loss of using multiple folders.

In Windows 7 all you have to do, using the mentioned program is patch your main folder, delete the 2 symlink folders from your copies and redo the link to the new one, and copy over your WoW execute that's it. There is nothing else to do and it works perfectly fine. Again this is in Win 7, XP you probably have to break the links and then recreate and copy your Wow.exe file to your other folders. In XP if you don't break the links prior to deletion they might delete your linked from folders, have not done it in XP so could be wrong. I keep seeing this I had to reinstall because of my symlink, and well I did the same thing until I read in one of the threads what you have to do.

Can anyone explain why it would be a benefit to have the OS think its loading multiple files? - Surely caching would be better if it knew it was loading the same one.

I've always thought a bigger cache - i.e. lots more memory - was better than anything you can do with disk access speed. I'm not sure how the new SSD's work out, but I've seen some tests say the difference is marginal.