You will get the best performance out of multiple folders that symlink back to a master folder for some of their contents. The reason you shouldn't run multiple instances in the same folder is that you will get contention for some files. Wow has cache files as well as log files that it reads and/or writes from/to. If these files are shared, you could end up with some file locking issues. Data files, however, are only read from and by symlinking these you gain the benefit of the both the filesystem cache and potentially some hard drive caching.

In theory, you should aim to have your read only files together, and you read/write files seperate.

I was going to write more and go into more detail, but work distracted me.

- Souca -