City Lag

[dancook]

2.4 Quad, 8800 GTX, 4gb ram
5 x WOW

Entering orgrimmar I get a lot performance lag for about a minute, memory usage goes from 2.2gigs to 3.2gigs. CPU is nearing 100% for the majority.

Is this inevitable? I'm reluctant to reduce graphics settings because it's only a temporary thing.. but will upgrading hardware resolve it?

edit. pardon this was meant for h/w forum, but appreciate any response

[Teq]

Its not realy the city that causes the lag usually. Its all the people and npc's. I.E. Try what happends when you are dead in a city and dont load them. Easy to check if that is the problem for you too.

I remember somehting you could change in the WTF file, that reduced the range and amount of npc's that where loaded. I'll see if i can find it.

[keyclone]

the perfomance drop would be each wow client trying to read all the data from disk at the same time. to improve such a situation, you would need multi-readers... ie: multiple disk drives. if you want to get crazy, 4 smallish hard drives, each with a different wow instance would give you 1 read per wow. you could change it to a single stripped raid... which would also improve performance...

either way, you will have the memory usage as it needs the data to render the area.

[dancook]

the perfomance drop would be each wow client trying to read all the data from disk at the same time. to improve such a situation, you would need multi-readers... ie: multiple disk drives. if you want to get crazy, 4 smallish hard drives, each with a different wow instance would give you 1 read per wow. you could change it to a single stripped raid... which would also improve performance...

either way, you will have the memory usage as it needs the data to render the area.

I'll stick my main wow folder on the D: and test the theory - be interesting if it works

IF it were the case, i wonder if you could use memory cards to contain the wow folders would access/transfer rate be high enough.. firewire/network/usb solutions?

[Notes]

I'll put Keyclone's solution to the test aswell, might be worth a shot. Got the same problem and indeed 5 WoW's on 1 HD.

WIll try it asap when I get home tonight!

[dancook]

http://www.sandisk.com/Products/Prod...o.aspx?ID=2006

40mb/s transfer rate, though I wouldn't know if it's enough ..

[dancook]

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Produ...oductID=624046

sweet 8gb external usb 2.0 drive.. x 4 ...

[Notes]

WoW folders are like 8.5gb in totall(well mine are anyway) so those are a bit too small in GB's

[leukos]

4GB Compact Flash cards with high read speed are becoming more affordable, the 8GB still seem to be relatively pricey. However, there are other solutions.

Addonics makes one of them. The Quad-CF PCI Controller allows you to combine 4 Compact Flash cards into one RAID0 drive, two separate RAID1 drives, one RAID 10 drive, or four separate drives. I've included a picture below, and more information can be found at http://www.addonics.com/products/fla...r/ad4cfprj.asp.



Addonics also makes Compact Flash to SATA converters, and the hardware that will let you mount them in 3.5" and 2.5" bays. They also make this:



Use your imagination, it will fit into a single 5.25" drive bay.

The folks over in the mp3car forum have spent a lot of time using Compact Flash as hard drive replacements and have addressed some of the main problems with them. Before someone brings up the write-cycle lifetime of using Compact Flash cards make sure you take a look at a driver released from Microsoft called the Enhanced Write Driver (EWF).

EWF can provide an overlay of a file system in RAM. Any writes to the file system get saved to RAM, essentially tricking the operating system into thinking the write was successful. When the computer reboots the information in RAM gets lost. It can also do the same to a hard drive, but then you lose most of the advantageous of using flash memory.

Sometimes, it is easier to just spend the extra $300 and get a proper solid state drive. There is something to be said about buying a product by a single SKU instead of a two page bill of materials and assembly instructions that read like the recently released Budget of the United States Government.

As a side note, Keyclone's comment on multiple disk is correct. When you start issuing a large number of read and write requests you will eventually reach a point where one disk can not perform the work. You need more hands (disk). I work on some smaller computer systems, one of which we need to run across about 100 15K Fibre disk in order to meet our Service Level Agreement (SLA). The only other way we could reach that is with a RAMSAN (think giant compact flash card). And, no, they won't let me run Warcraft on it.

[Nepida]

I had this problem too, cities were bad and shatrath during the day was an absolute nightmare.

However (!) there is a way to really help this if you meet the following criteria.
1) Running Windows Vista
2) Your problem stems from the fact that you have 5 seperate copies of the Warcraft directory

What you need to do is link all the Data and Cache directories in your clone Wow folders to the main one.

ex:
c:\Program Files (x86)\wow2\Data -> c:\Program Files (x86)\wow1\Data
c:\Program Files (x86)\wow2\Cache -> c:\Program Files (x86)\wow1\Cache

You do this with the 'mklink' tool.

1) Remove the Data and Cache directories in each clone wow folder (or rename them)
2) Open up the Command Prompt
3) Change directory to the clone wow
> cd c:\Program Files (x86)\wow2
4) Make the link
> mklink /D Data c:\Program Files (x86)\wow1\Data
> mklink /D Cache c:\Program Files (x86)\wow1\Cache
5) Repeat for each other clone directory

Doing this reduced my lag in shatrath from horrible to zero.

edit: The main reason I did this was when I got my epic flyers anytime I would fly over _anything_ I had a high chance of losing one, it doesn't happen anymore

:!: Concerns:
I haven't upgraded WoW yet with a patch, and because the files are split like this there may be issues. This is why I haven't deleted the data directories yet, so I can restore them if I have to.