Where is the weakness in my hardware set up.

[Arryth]

Try launching without your addons on at all and see. Simple to test.

Ok. I toyed around with my add ons, and removing alot of them seems to help the fps problem a little.

I'm currently down to only:
Bagnon (for single bag inventory, i skiped its extra bells and whistles)
Bongos 3 (I just love this add on, and allways have)
Chronometer (I like exact numbers on my cool downs and such)
CyCircled (chicks dig round buttons0
DoubleWide (the regular questing screen makes my eyes bleed)
Fubar3 (I love my little bars with the quick data access they provide)
Multiboxer V2 (for quest accepting on all team member, + the follow after combat and whisper pass features are nice)
NDragit (Non movable blizzard windows make me a sad, sad panda.)
Omnicc (for the cool down functions that Chron does not provide)
Postal (just plain useful)
Witchhunt (the incoming spell warning is a lifesaver)
Xperl Unit frames. (they are pretty, and I can actually get and read the data I need).

Using the above vs using none at all is making almost no fps difference in Shat. I'm still getting some shuttering, and my fps on the main (set to maxfps of 30, min 8 when in background) are still fluctuating wildly. Its especially bad in prime time, dispite my latency telling me I'm always 150 or less on all instances of wow. It seems to want to jump between around 5-20 ish alot, with several second pauses of intermitant shuttering.

I ditched Cartographer, Quest Helper, Routes, among lots of other add ons.

Any other suggestions of what I can cut to improve performance in shat?

To recap...
I'm running 5 wow instances, each with its own folder, each assigned their own processor core, except for the last two which share core 4. I use keyclone with its maxamiser feature, to place one instance on monitor 1 and a four way split screen on monitor 2. I use the keyclone pip feature to switch up the instances featured on screen one. All instances of wow are at the lowest graphics settings the slider bars will allow me to set. The maxfps for all instances 2-5 are set to 15 fps if they are in the foreground and 5 fps if they are the background. Instance 1 is set for maxfps of 30, and 5 when in background. I run with sound disabled on all instances. My computer specs are posted in the op.

So... is there any thing else I can do to get rid of the shuttering and fps hit I'm taking in Shat, and to a lesser extent other cities, and the new island quest area.

[Hachoo]

Theres a bunch of other things that you didn't tell us that will severely affect your performance.

I am 5 boxing on a system much slower than yours with 0 FPS issues - even in org/shatt I have way more than 4 fps.

First and foremost, are you running all copies of WoW from completely separate folders? You should have 5 different folders like C:\wow1, C:\wow2, etc, and running each copy from each separate folder.

Secondly, when you run each copy of WoW are you hard setting the processor affinity for each one? To do this, open up task manager and right click on wow.exe in the processes tab as they appear, then change the affinity (basically uncheck all but one CPU box). You will want the first 3 accounts running on CPU 0, 1, and 2, and then the last 2 running on CPU 3.

Third, if you have more than 1 hard drive in your system, spread the Wow1, Wow2, etc folders between the HDs - this will help a lot. Put the main wow folder plus 1 other on the first hard drive, and 3 other wow folders on the second.

Set all 4 background WoWs to 800x600 resolution, 1x AA (ie: no multisampling), lowest graphics setting (except environmental detail max for object range), sound off. The primary WoW window can be larger - I use 1024x768 with sound, and a couple of the sliders up a bit with 0 problems, and I only have an 8600GT, dual core athlon x2, and 3GB of memory.

Last, DO NOT MINIMIZE ANY OF YOUR WOW WINDOWS. I'm not sure why people suggest this, all it does for me is slow my entire system down and make switching to one of the minimized windows take 10+ seconds.

If you do/check all of these I think you will find a lot of your performance issues go away.

[zanthor]

The video card may indeed be the issue here since you are using a 32 bit OS. If the lost memory is pushing you below 3GB (it should be) physical ram, then running 5 clients on the machine would cause it to start paging memory which is where you take a huge hit on performance.

I'd be curious to see how it performed with a 512GB card, or with Vista 64 on it instead.

Other than that, the best advice has already been given...

/console maxfps 30
/console maxfpsbk 15 (I chose 15 because @ 12 I'd sometimes lose /follow, but @ 15 I never do, and it's background, you don't need 30 FPS)

Setting the secondary clients to minimal graphics settings helps, turning off sound on them helps a LOT.

Another big tip, turn off the "Play sound while in background" (This may be off by default) as it disables the sound engine for 4 clients out of the 5, which makes it a lot less noisy as well as saving big CPU hits.

Another thing, since it's a quad core you have to set your affinity or WoW will only use CPU 0 & 1.

PowerShell script to create symbolically linked (mklink) copies of WoW

That thread explains how to create simlinked copies of wow, this has helped me in both performance and sanity, as you can have different settings but still access a single set of data files. You patch once, and all clients are patched. Update 1 set of addons, all are updated, etc.

[Arryth]

PowerShell script to create symbolically linked (mklink) copies of WoW[/url]

That thread explains how to create simlinked copies of wow, this has helped me in both performance and sanity, as you can have different settings but still access a single set of data files. You patch once, and all clients are patched. Update 1 set of addons, all are updated, etc.

Where is the weakness in my hardware set up?



This is my current "main" rig I'm using my multibox WoW x5. I use this
machine + keyclone and keyclones' maxamizer feature + 2 monitors. Vista Home Premium is the OS. For isp
I run on time warner cable premium highspeed internet for gaming. My
computer is connected to the net via a linksys wrt54gs router, that is connected to my
cable modem. Both monitors are connected to the lone video card. I run them in extended desk top mode.
The game is showing my ping to be in the 150's most of the
time, with all five instances of wow going at once. I have 5 different wow folders linked to one folder based of the instructions from the link in Zanthors post. I assign two wow instances to one core, and
one each to the remaining three cores. I try it using manual assignment of core affinity, but I cant tell if they are sticking to it. I have significantly lowered my number of addons used, and removed Questhelper completely from my system.
Each instance of WoW is set to lowest graphics settings that the sliders will let me lower them. Monitor 1 has just one maxamized window set to 1680x1050 resolution in game, and that is also the window size in maxamizer. On monitor 2 I have 4 windows set to 800x600 resolution in game and window size of 720x450 in maxamizer, so they all fit. The main is set to maxfps 30, maxfpsbk 8. The second monitor with the 4 instances of wow has each set at 15 mfps, maxfpsbk 8. Speed fan is showing my processer hiting 52 degrees.


My problem is, that when I'm running four or even worse all 5 of my wow
instances on this machine, I'm getting some significant fps lag in Shattarah. When
out of heavily PC populated areas its not bad at all, but in Shat its
horrible, and can also be bad in other cities, though never as bad as shat. My
mains fps drops to 4-30, with severe shuttering and pauses in all
windows of up to 4 seconds, even with almost all addons disabled, and all graphics
settings bottomed out, and sound disabled. I have the main window set
to 30 fps when in front, and 8 when in the background, the others are
set to 15, and 8 respectively. Having all toons look at just the ground
does not seem to help with this. It can take me up to three min to get
from the windrider in Shattrah to the island portal when it gets bad at primtime. Its usually mild in the off peak hours, but get at its worst at primtime.



I have tried getting one of those new speedy usb flash drives for the
supposed Vista performance enhancer. (its an 8 gig one), which seems to
have not helped. I have tried updating all of my drivers and have full
windows updates. To my knowledge nothing is running in the background
other then keyclone.



I use Nortons 360' for my virus protection and other stuff, as well as
manually keeping clutter down. I have checked it over relentlessly for
spyware, ect and I'm clean.



I can't seem to find my weakness here causing my lag. I have included
my full computer specs below. I run Windows Vista Home Premium for my
operating system on this. I use keyclone with maxamizer to have the
lead account on monitor 1 in its own maxamized window, and the other
four instances on monitor 2 in a four way split screen.





Here are my official specs.

Gaming Computers, Custom Gaming PC Systems, PC Gaming Rigs : Velocity Raptor™ DCX Custom Gaming Computer System



Weight: 75 lbs







Case



LXe-W Silver- Velocity Micro Signature Case - Pure Aluminum, side window, removable front door, extended depth



Power Supply

1200 Watt Velocity Micro® Power Supply - Nvidia® SLI™ Certified

Motherboard

EVGA nForce 680i SLI, Socket 775, PCI-E, DDR2

Processor

Intel® Core™ 2 Quad processor Q6600, quad 2.4GHz cores, 8MB L2 Cache

CPU Cooling

Arctic Cooling® Freezer 7 Pro Heatsink, Ultra Quiet Fan, Copper Heat Pipes, plus Arctic Silver™ 5 Thermal Compound

DDR2 Memory

4096MB Corsair Dominator DDR2-800 Twin2X2048-6400 with Dual-path Heat Xchange (4x1024)

PCX Video

1GB Diamond Radeon HD 2900XT HDMI/HDCP Velocity Micro Performance Edition (850w PSU Recommended)

Monitor

Velocity Micro™ W220 - 22" as Monitor 1

HP 20 Inch w1907 as monitor 2

Audio

Creative Labs SoundBlaster® X-Fi™ XtremeAudio

Hard Drive 1

2 x 400GB Hitachi 7200rpm 16MB Cache SATA 300 w/NCQ - RAID 0 (800GB Total)

Optical Drive 1

20x Lite On® DVD+/-RW/CD-RW Dual Layer, Black Bezel

Floppy Drive & Media Reader

1.44MB Floppy Drive, Black

FireWire

2 Integrated IEEE 1394 FireWire Ports, 1 front & 1 rear

On-Line Gaming Accelerator

ONLY Integrated 10/100/1000MBps Gigabit Ethernet Network Adapter

USB 2.0 Ports

8 USB 2.0 Ports, 2 front & 6 rear (2 rear ports may be unavailable in some configurations due to available resources)

Operating System

Genuine Microsoft® Windows® Vista Home Premium 32-bit

Internal Cables

Rounded Silver Braided IDE and Floppy Cables

Keyboard

Velocity Micro™ Keyboard with Lighted Palm Rest - Black, USB

Mouse

Velocity Micro™ Ultimate Laser Mouse with 2400 dpi Resolution, USB

Assembly

Immaculate custom hand wiring by Senior Technicians, assembled in Richmond, Virginia, USA

Quality Assurance

Individual custom testing for complete system functionality, signed by the system builder and QA inspector

Documentation

Owner's Portfolio with Velocity Micro manual, driver disks, and accessory pack.

[Arryth]

PowerShell script to create symbolically linked (mklink) copies of WoW[/url]

That thread explains how to create simlinked copies of wow, this has helped me in both performance and sanity, as you can have different settings but still access a single set of data files. You patch once, and all clients are patched. Update 1 set of addons, all are updated, etc.

Where is the weakness in my hardware set up?



This is my current "main" rig I'm using my multibox WoW x5. I use this
machine + keyclone and keyclones' maxamizer feature + 2 monitors. Vista Home Premium is the OS. For isp
I run on time warner cable premium highspeed internet for gaming. My
computer is connected to the net via a linksys wrt54gs router, that is connected to my
cable modem. Both monitors are connected to the lone video card. I run them in extended desk top mode.
The game is showing my ping to be in the 150's most of the
time, with all five instances of wow going at once. I have 5 different wow folders linked to one folder based of the instructions from the link in Zanthors post. I assign two wow instances to one core, and
one each to the remaining three cores. I try it using manual assignment of core affinity, but I cant tell if they are sticking to it. I have significantly lowered my number of addons used, and removed Questhelper completely from my system.
Each instance of WoW is set to lowest graphics settings that the sliders will let me lower them. Monitor 1 has just one maxamized window set to 1680x1050 resolution in game, and that is also the window size in maxamizer. On monitor 2 I have 4 windows set to 800x600 resolution in game and window size of 720x450 in maxamizer, so they all fit. The main is set to maxfps 30, maxfpsbk 8. The second monitor with the 4 instances of wow has each set at 15 mfps, maxfpsbk 8. Speed fan is showing my processer hiting 52 degrees.


My problem is, that when I'm running four or even worse all 5 of my wow
instances on this machine, I'm getting some significant fps lag in Shattarah. When
out of heavily PC populated areas its not bad at all, but in Shat its
horrible, and can also be bad in other cities, though never as bad as shat. My
mains fps drops to 4-30, with severe shuttering and pauses in all
windows of up to 4 seconds, even with almost all addons disabled, and all graphics
settings bottomed out, and sound disabled. I have the main window set
to 30 fps when in front, and 8 when in the background, the others are
set to 15, and 8 respectively. Having all toons look at just the ground
does not seem to help with this. It can take me up to three min to get
from the windrider in Shattrah to the island portal when it gets bad at primtime. Its usually mild in the off peak hours, but get at its worst at primtime.



I have tried getting one of those new speedy usb flash drives for the
supposed Vista performance enhancer. (its an 8 gig one), which seems to
have not helped. I have tried updating all of my drivers and have full
windows updates. To my knowledge nothing is running in the background
other then keyclone.



I use Nortons 360' for my virus protection and other stuff, as well as
manually keeping clutter down. I have checked it over relentlessly for
spyware, ect and I'm clean.



I can't seem to find my weakness here causing my lag. I have included
my full computer specs below. I run Windows Vista Home Premium for my
operating system on this. I use keyclone with maxamizer to have the
lead account on monitor 1 in its own maxamized window, and the other
four instances on monitor 2 in a four way split screen.





Here are my official specs.

Gaming Computers, Custom Gaming PC Systems, PC Gaming Rigs : Velocity Raptor™ DCX Custom Gaming Computer System



Weight: 75 lbs







Case



LXe-W Silver- Velocity Micro Signature Case - Pure Aluminum, side window, removable front door, extended depth



Power Supply

1200 Watt Velocity Micro® Power Supply - Nvidia® SLI™ Certified

Motherboard

EVGA nForce 680i SLI, Socket 775, PCI-E, DDR2

Processor

Intel® Core™ 2 Quad processor Q6600, quad 2.4GHz cores, 8MB L2 Cache

CPU Cooling

Arctic Cooling® Freezer 7 Pro Heatsink, Ultra Quiet Fan, Copper Heat Pipes, plus Arctic Silver™ 5 Thermal Compound

DDR2 Memory

4096MB Corsair Dominator DDR2-800 Twin2X2048-6400 with Dual-path Heat Xchange (4x1024)

PCX Video

1GB Diamond Radeon HD 2900XT HDMI/HDCP Velocity Micro Performance Edition (850w PSU Recommended)

Monitor

Velocity Micro™ W220 - 22" as Monitor 1

HP 20 Inch w1907 as monitor 2

Audio

Creative Labs SoundBlaster® X-Fi™ XtremeAudio

Hard Drive 1

2 x 400GB Hitachi 7200rpm 16MB Cache SATA 300 w/NCQ - RAID 0 (800GB Total)

Optical Drive 1

20x Lite On® DVD+/-RW/CD-RW Dual Layer, Black Bezel

Floppy Drive & Media Reader

1.44MB Floppy Drive, Black

FireWire

2 Integrated IEEE 1394 FireWire Ports, 1 front & 1 rear

On-Line Gaming Accelerator

ONLY Integrated 10/100/1000MBps Gigabit Ethernet Network Adapter

USB 2.0 Ports

8 USB 2.0 Ports, 2 front & 6 rear (2 rear ports may be unavailable in some configurations due to available resources)

Operating System

Genuine Microsoft® Windows® Vista Home Premium 32-bit

Internal Cables

Rounded Silver Braided IDE and Floppy Cables

Keyboard

Velocity Micro™ Keyboard with Lighted Palm Rest - Black, USB

Mouse

Velocity Micro™ Ultimate Laser Mouse with 2400 dpi Resolution, USB

Assembly

Immaculate custom hand wiring by Senior Technicians, assembled in Richmond, Virginia, USA

Quality Assurance

Individual custom testing for complete system functionality, signed by the system builder and QA inspector

Documentation

Owner's Portfolio with Velocity Micro manual, driver disks, and accessory pack.

[/quote] Found something weird :thumbup: ......... Raising my slider on the object draw distence in the game video options, actually slightly improves my lag in Shattrah...... I will keep running around in the city to see if it continues.

[-silencer-]

Found something weird :thumbup: ......... Raising my slider on the object draw distence in the game video options, actually slightly improves my lag in Shattrah...... I will keep running around in the city to see if it continues.

I just read the thread from the beginning for the first time, and your last statement is what I've been thinking all along. It's probably the hard drives. Yes, RAID0 has faster transfer rates than a single drive. But it is NO faster in random read access times. WoW, in cities especially, has to very frequently find (access time) and load (transfer rate) hundreds of very small files for terrain and object polygons and textures. By expanding the object draw distance, I suspect that it's increasing the radius at which it keeps these objects/textures in memory, reducing the amount of hard drive accesses that need to be made if other players come and go into your "object draw distance."

Even 10k rpm drives in a RAID0 array can be too slow (notably access times) for the amount of thrashing that goes on in a busy Shatt. I ordered a 32GB SSD this morning, so hopefully next week I'll be able to test the performance improvement of putting the WoW/data folder on a solid state disk with access times around 0.3ms (as opposed to the top-line Velociraptor's ~4-5ms). If it is a noticeable improvement, I'll order another and an Areca PCI-x1 RAID controller and RAID0 them.. then get a feel for how WoW handles random reads on nearly-instant random reads with transfer rates higher than a Velociraptor.

[Arryth]

Found something weird :thumbup: ......... Raising my slider on the object draw distence in the game video options, actually slightly improves my lag in Shattrah...... I will keep running around in the city to see if it continues.

I just read the thread from the beginning for the first time, and your last statement is what I've been thinking all along. It's probably the hard drives. Yes, RAID0 has faster transfer rates than a single drive. But it is NO faster in random read access times. WoW, in cities especially, has to very frequently find (access time) and load (transfer rate) hundreds of very small files for terrain and object polygons and textures. By expanding the object draw distance, I suspect that it's increasing the radius at which it keeps these objects/textures in memory, reducing the amount of hard drive accesses that need to be made if other players come and go into your "object draw distance."

Even 10k rpm drives in a RAID0 array can be too slow (notably access times) for the amount of thrashing that goes on in a busy Shatt. I ordered a 32GB SSD this morning, so hopefully next week I'll be able to test the performance improvement of putting the WoW/data folder on a solid state disk with access times around 0.3ms (as opposed to the top-line Velociraptor's ~4-5ms). If it is a noticeable improvement, I'll order another and an Areca PCI-x1 RAID controller and RAID0 them.. then get a feel for how WoW handles random reads on nearly-instant random reads with transfer rates higher than a Velociraptor.

Other then tossing my drives and starting from scratch, is there any remedy to this problem? A third HD perhaps? Maby 8 to 12 gig flash drive with the main wow folder on it? Mayby a way to preload allot fo the textures, and keep them in extended memory?

Also... I have added an 8 gig flash drive for Windows Vista Ready Boost. I already have 4 gigs of what I think is decent gaming memory. (check my specs above and let me know if I'm mistaken). Will my machine be able to ever use this extra memory? Or am in just wasting hardware? Is windows visty ready boos useful to use at all? I have been trying to research the subject, but am finding very little about it, and most of that is very dated material.

How I set my folders for wow now is - there are 5 seperate full wow folders. Named wowmain1 - wowmain2. I used the powershell script I found on this site to make symbolic copies of each of these folders, named wow1 - wow5. So when I start keyclone, its refers to the symbolic link folders to load each wow. It does seem a bit faster. I'm not sure that I'm doing it quite right. Should it just be 1 folder linked to all 5 wow main folders? Or, each wow having its own distinct symbolic link folder?

I do not mind dropping money to fix this, I just want to make sure I get the correct parts to correct the problem. I have been boxing for a while, and am just tired of the Shatt lag. I'm going to play with the distences some more today to see if that helps more.

Thank you every body for your input so far. If I have no included needed computer or configuration information on this, please let me know what else to add.

fyi. My processor is running at 50 degrees C on all cores when useing all 5 wow. Is this to hot for my listed chip. I have not overclocked any thing.

[-silencer-]

Another standard HDD won't fix the problem, but don't toss your drives. The symlink method for the data folder is the correct way to do it. USB flash drives most likely won't help (they're WAY too slow), and I haven't come across any real conclusions from using the Vista ReadyBoost feature yet. I'll make a thread after running tests on the SSD drive I've ordered.. to give people a better idea of the cost/benefit of going that route. If the benefit is there, I may delay the review until I test two of them with a dedicated RAID0 controller. Right now they're expensive, even for the cheaper/slower (but still WAY faster than any standard spindle HDD for our random reads in WoW) MLC models (~$200 for 32GB).

Although warm, 50*C is within spec for a Q6600 at full load. Don't worry about it.. 55-60* I'd start to get concerned..

I'm sure some of the problem has to do with the requirements handed down to WoW developers from the producers. Bliz games are pretty strict about not requiring the latest hardware to run, so I wouldn't be surprised if they sacrificed some performance by not caching data as much as they should, especially for our modern machines with tons of available memory. I work on military simulations with miles of high-detail terrain polygons with entity counts in the 1000's. Maintaining real-time performance and holding true to precision accuracy is a very fine line to balance, and it usually requires expanding to faster/more hardware once you hit the optimization wall. When you're so severely limited on your hardware requirements, as all Bliz games have been, you have to either sacrifice performance or quality. Remember how nasty 800x600 Diablo 2 looked? People complained about the horrible resolution during beta, but the quality had to be sacrificed to get decent performance on older machines. It's just a shame that there isn't more of an expandible architecture used when designing these games.. something I have to always consider at work since hardware does change over time.

[Arryth]

Thanks mate. I pushed the object draw distance on all five characters to max... Lag vanishes almost completely. It makes little since to me, but I', not complaining. Must sweeter to play now. I did not want to have to go back to my multi rig set up.