Which gives better performance?

[Tybudd]

I dual box with only 2 toons, on 1 cpu. so at all times I'm using 1 monitor, and I control the slave toon using keyclone.


My question is would it be better (performance wise) for me to either:
1. Load WOW up from only 1 directory, and load up both my accounts from that 1 directory.
2. Load 2 directories of wow, so each of my accounts will have their own directory to load from.


in which area does it cause less stress on my system if any, and in doing either, does my fps raise some or not?

[Aethon]

I've never had any issues with 1 folder. Now, I have recently created a second WoW folder so I can have addons loaded on my main that aren't loaded on my alts (In retrospect, I realize I could have just disabled for the individual accounts)

[Tybudd]

Yeah mines is insane, running an instance alone in a regular area, my fps is at 95-110 no problem, and in shatt 60-75 FPS, so you would think that my system is great, but when I'm running both wow's, my fps drop all the way down to 10-15fps and at times spikes up to 25fps, horrible.

[Tybudd]

/bump

Help please

[wowphreak]

The only reason to have multiple folders is so yeh can have different config setting for each account.

[sqeaky4100]

The only reason to have multiple folders is so yeh can have different config setting for each account.

That.

best performance would be to buy a $75 320gb hardrive and add that. Then install your main account ( with the high settings ) on one hard drive. And the others on the new one.

[Wide]

So...

I'm 5boxing using 1 installation, would it be wise to move all my slaves to a second wow installation on another HD? (I'm already using the "lower-graphic-detail" macro)

[Aethon]

Only if you need it. I'm running 5 from a laptop, decent specs (not the best of the best) I have the 4 alts on 1024x768 and the main on 1280x1024. All the graphics are turned to the lowest settings (I've been everywhere before, I don't need to see it rendered in the highest quality again) and of course, all windowed.

I might throw an external monitor on it and move the alts to there, but it'll still all be on the same graphics processor.

[Otlecs]

1. Load WOW up from only 1 directory, and load up both my accounts from that 1 directory.
2. Load 2 directories of wow, so each of my accounts will have their own directory to load from.

All else being equal (and it's often not...), loading from one directory will almost certainly be faster than loading from two, because the disk cache will be used more effectively.

in which area does it cause less stress on my system if any, and in doing either, does my fps raise some or not?

You may get fewer physical I/Os, and that will raise your framerate when WoW's doing some background loading of textures, etc. *shrug*.

Given the nature of your question, I'm assuming that you've already diagnosed your performance bottleneck as being disk I/O rather than any of the myriad of other possible causes.

Is that a safe assumption?

[wetstreet]

Depending on your computer skills, you can try something like the Mac hybrid approach. The basic idea is to create a new directory for each WoW instance, but link to the original data files. This gives you a way to configure each client differently but still keep the efficient memory usage and disk caching.

If you have no idea what I just said then I suggest you ignore me.