Where is the weakness in my hardware set up.

[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.