Which gives better performance?

[Memn]

Otlecs,

70% Memory utilization is too high. Windows isn't reporting only physical memory usage, even though it leads you to believe it is. Page Faults are not the same as Page File Hits. (A Page Fault is a memory access error, its a completely different thing). When you have enough ram, and wow is not causing page file hits, it hardly uses any hard disk except when you are loading, or entering a new zone.

I was running 4 GB, with a 768MB Video card (so really only 3.25 GB) and it wasn't enough memory for me. I could tell because I couldn't run around Shatt without losing straggling clones due to freezing long enough to fall out of follow distance. Different disk setups had little to no impact. Adding 2gb of ram and upgrading to Vista 64bit enabled me to do loops around Shattrah full speed with no stragglers during primetime on friday night. Its night and day.

[Memn]

If you want to measure how much of your paging file you are using, goto Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Performance and add a counter for "Paging File > % Usage > _Total" keep performance monitor up while you run around Shatt for a little bit. If this counter does not stay nice and low, and jumps erratically, you can benefit from ram upgrade.

[Otlecs]

loading, or entering a new zone.

Which is exactly what I'm seeing - losing followers when initially entering a zone that's heavily populated by players wearing a varity of armour and weapons.

We're in danger of descending into "teaching each other to suck eggs" territory, so I'll bow out of this after this post, but rest assured that I know a thing or two about measuring performance (including physical memory usage) on a wide range of platforms and I would bet good beer money on my specific problem being I/O related

I don't recognise your description of a page fault as a "memory access error" other than in the very broadest sense. It's (typically) an application attempting to access a page (or pagelet) of memory that's been stuffed onto disk for the time being. That often causes a "hard" page fault, which is a hit on the page file.

I wonder if you're getting confused with protection faults?

No matter. I'll be sure to post back with my results once I have them, though I am encouraged by the SSD results, which also conclude that I/O was the bottleneck in his particular configuration.

As an aside, the machine in question is a liquid cooled Vista64 box with 2x1GB video cards (no, I don't just play WoW!) a 3.67Ghz quad core 9650 and two striped arrays of disks - one matched, one mis-matched... to be fixed by the Raptors!. The memory is 1333MHz DDR3... still not a bad rig even now it's a few months old.

[Memn]

We're in danger of descending into "teaching each other to suck eggs" territory

Yeah, I think we are both troubleshooting different symptoms. The OP was mostly concerned about his FPS I think, and I wasn't realizing that you were really talking about optimizing load time. I was talking about reducing "shudder"... I blame the OP for not being more specific about his symptoms ;-)

[-silencer-]

A 5400 RPM is fast enough to service the IO required to load the textures used in Wow, interraction with the pagefile that is most likely causing this. If your experiencing this, max out your Ram before buying a 10k hard disk.

On a busy server while flying into Shatt, I can guarantee a 5400rpm drive isn't enough to handle loading all the data needed for 5-boxing WoW. While using separate installs, before I symlinked to the /Data directory on my Raptors, I would occasionally have one of my instances of WoW crash due to a "Failed to read data" error from my 7200rpm drive. There were too many small I/O requests to keep up with the game, and it would crash since some I/O requests weren't being finished within a reasonable amount of time. This error never occurred after I symlinked the /Data directory to my RAID0 Raptors, but I'd still lag like crazy while flying into Shatt, and many players/objects/textures wouldn't show up for up to 20-30 seconds after landing. *All* of these problems went away after symlinking to a /Data directory on my SSD.

These were the primary links that convinced me to try out an OCZ Core SSD for WoW:
http://www.guru3d.com/article/ocz-co...drive-review/8
http://www.overclock3d.net/reviews.p...d_state_disk/1
http://www.bluefi.co.uk/

[Memn]

I dunno how to account for it, but I'm seeing ALOT less disk access on my system that your describing. I installed multiple drives expecting to configure them for optimal disk IO but am having very little disk IO (other than when loading) with a single install on a single 7200k SATA drive. For my usage patterns, I would think a slower drive would only impact my loading screen duration. I saw ALOT more disk IO before my memory upgrade, which is the only reason I keep bringing that up.

[Memn]

Otlecs, - Silencer -,

How much ram are you guys running with?

As I've said previously, upgrading from 3.25GB to 6GB was a huge performance increase for me, and a drastic reduction in Disk IO. I am typically using 4.5GB while 5 boxing.