Performance issues

[zanthor]

I have 4gm ram and i had the same issue. when i was running around questing everything was fine but as soon as i entered the likes of Stormwind everything started to stutter. I got around this by opening task manager then going to processes, right clicking each of the wow processes and selecting affinity, from here i was able to set all the running wows (5 of them) to use all 4 processors. after doing this all copies ran like a single instance of the game would. i guess this will only really work like this if you have a quad core. give it a try if you do.

I've already configured Keyclone to set the affinity of different wows to different cores. Although with 5 wows and 'only' a quad core, two instances will need to share 1 core.
I get the impression (but I'm not 100% certain) that the problem is one of memory / paging, rather than CPU though.

What you are describing definitely sounds like memory issues and paging. You can reduce the memory footprint by setting your terrain distance to minimal settings, however the unfortunate fact is you'll see this again on busy days in Shattrah.

Personally I'm looking at upgrading to Vista 64 because of this issue, most the time I run smooth enough to get around, but with my 5 shamans I have things setup so I can change the head of the hydra easily, which means each clients at medium settings... this means huge lag in Shattrah... cpu sits at about 65-85% and ram is at 98%...