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.