Multiboxing Wiki - Multicpu, Multigpu, Multiharddrive, Multimonitor, etc and Bounded Issues. Revision 3. Work in Progress.

[vchi]

Dubiox-

First thing is did you leave your paging file at default or did you turn it off?

Second thing is to verify whether or not you have a shortage of system memory and how much of additional system memory you need to overcome that shortage, look in your task manager and see where memory usage is higher than available physical memory. Take the difference between the two and see whether or not you have available DIMM slots and / or correct density of memory to meet that shortage. In addition:

1) 32-bit OS: Task manager will not report correctly how much memory you have available (paradox with the second thing statement). Remember that the 32-bit OS is limited to an address space of 4GB which is shared with applications, i/o and other related operating system components. Out of that 4GB address space, 2GB is designed for applications and the other 2GB is designed for i/o and operating system related functions. As you add more and more components that utilize the address space, you will lose access to more and more of the available memory. Example:

Reported memory installed: 4GB
Usage
500MB address space for system I/O
500MB address space for graphics card A
500MB address space for graphics card B
Total available memory: 4GB - 500MB - 500MB - 500MB = 2.5GB

Application A needs 2GB
Application B needs 1GB

Operating system allocates 2GB to application A.
Operating system attempts to allocate 1GB to application B and either application gets 500MB of memory and 500MB page file or crashes because of no available memory for allocation.
or...
Operating system allocates 1GB to application A and 1GB page file.
Operating system allocates 1GB to application B.
or...
It really depends on the application...

2) There are boot time parameters you can modify to increase your application address space, but that is beyond the scope of this discussion and irrelevant to your purpose. But if someone insist on using the boot time parameters, then using the above example, this might happen:

Boot time parameter adjust I/O address space of 2GB to 1GB. Application address space adjusted from 2GB to 3GB.
Operating system allocates 500MB address space for system I/O.
Operating system allocates 500MB address space for graphics card A.
Operating system crashes because it cannot allocate 500MB address space, because there is none available or operating system loads but reports that graphic card B has an error due to unavailable address space.

or...
When you load an application, it crashes and causes random lock ups.

or...
It really depends on the application...


4) When and if you do decide to upgrade to a 64-bit operating system, keep in mind that 64-bit does not necessarily mean improved performance. The only thing it means is access to a larger address space (40-bit).

And replying to your question. "Why symbolic the wow dirs instead of running them all from the same directory?" You bring up a good question and to be honest, I don't think there is a really big different between symbolic link for 5 WoWs vs running 5 WoWs from the same folder. The reason why I choose the symbolic link option is to have each WoW have it's own custom WTF config file. As stated earlier, I have a NUMA platform and I don't want to risk running my application threads and memory transactions across the HT. To solve this issue, I prefer to set the processor affinity in the WTF config file. I know there are applications out there and listed in this forum that can do it at application load up without the use of the WTF config file. But I prefer to set it manually. Good point / question. I never actually thought about that when I did this guide. Thank you for bringing that up.

[Ken]

1. Central Processing Unit (CPU) Bound
Minimum: 1 core per WoW instance
Recommended: 2 cores per WoW instance

This is incorrect, as the amount of cores required depends completely on the speed of that core and other factors like your target framerate.
For example: I have a quad core CPU at 2.67Ghz. When I put 1 WoW instance on 1 core then this WoW instance(rendering at 30fps fixed rate) uses only about 50% of the core's CPU time.
Adding extra cores for 1 WoW instance will very likely not make any noticable difference.

2. System Memory Bound
Minimum: 600MB to 1 GB per WoW instance
Recommended: 2 GB per WoW instance

This is inaccurate, because it completely depends on the operating system, the OS settings(cache etc.) and the WoW quality settings. All these factors influence WoW RAM usage.
A minimum doesn't require a range, because a minimum is a set limit. Settings will also differ greatly depending on whether you use the windows 'swap file' or not.

6. Network Processing Unit (NPU) Bound
Minimum: Ensure your ISP connection's upload speed >= number of WoW instances * 56Kbps upload speed

Have you actually measured WoW's network speed? One WoW instance uses about 3kByte per second (1.5 up and 1.5 down), which is far from 56kbits per second last time I measured it.
Also: a 56kbit telephone line(which you are insinuating) is absolutel not comparable to an ISDN/ADSL/cable connection with an increased speed.

Recommended: 64-bit operating system for 4+ WoW instances running at full spec.

The reason for running 64-bit is when you have a 64bit CPU and when you want to use more than 4GB of RAM. This is a quite an important detail.

A node In the Unified Modeling Language (UML) is a computational resource upon which UML artifacts may be deployed for execution. [...]

Why quote that? This is one of the pieces of information that makes the article very bloated(9 lines of text that have nothing to do with the article!) and unreadable, as it's completely irrelevant information.

3. CPU Bound:
Observation 1:
While in Outland and also in the original WoW, overclocking my 4 core setup from 2.66GHz to 3.2GHz resulted in a modest 5-10 fps increase in each of the WoW instances.

How is that relevant information? It says absolutely nothing about FPS targets, how the original FPS was, whether the FPS increase was necessary, etc. etc.

I see a lot of references and observations, but our article really misses concrete (general) conclusions to be of any value to other people. There are too many inaccuracies, gaps and errors too, in my opinion. (I just picked out a few)
Sorry to be so negative, but please don't give people general hardware advise based the observations for your specific hardware.


[edit]
Also, an upgrade from:
4x2GB DDR2 800MHz

to:

4x4GB ECC Registered DDR2 667MHz
4x2GB ECC Registered DDR2 400MHz
Memory runs at 400MHz.

... is actually a downgrade, because memory speed is quite important in 3D rendering applications.
I recall someone posting on this forum about a performance increase after upgrading their RAM(in terms of speed) to 800MHz or faster.

[Moocifer]

50% cut and paste Wikipedia.

30% irrelevent.

15% utter nonsense.

5% meh.

Sorry.

[vchi]

Ken-

Thank you for replying to this thread. Constructive criticism is always appreciated in making this a better wiki. I have been working on this wiki for about a couple of days now. Adding stuff here and moving stuff there. But always making improvements. No, your comments are not negative. Like I said earlier, constructive criticism is always welcomed. I do think my hardware setup and the observations made to setup A and setup B can be useful to other people and could also apply to other people's setups.

Most of the observations made are in reference to common computing principles that apply to most computer setups. I try my best to limit unknown variables. I use settings that could be used on other setups so the results can be replicated. I don't say using these settings will have the same exact results, but will be close enough within reason to be the same.

Getting to your first comment about the CPU, the reason for the recommendation was load balancing. But I think I may need to reword this part depending on the point of view.
Viewpoint 1: The recommendation was made because Blizzard made a statement that WoW had dual-core support. Now, this suggest that WoW may have certain parts of the application multithreaded to some extent and at a later point in the future will include more multithreaded support. In anticipation to this possibility, having the additional core would not hurt but like I stated earlier, this would not improve performance noticeably (if a future WoW application had increased multithreaded support there's a chance for improved performance on a multi-core system).

Viewpoint 2: For a pure fps increase, I would just allocate 1 WoW instance to one core and go for the fastest core you can find. However, putting one or more WoW instances on the same core will hurt the performance.

Viewpoint 3: If you are using a framerate limiter, then depending on core utilization for the WoW applications that are affected by the framerate limiter, placing more than 1 WoW instance on the same core, would or would not affect performance too badly.

I must disagree with the comment about the amount of cores required (to play 1 WoW instance) is determined by the speed of each of the core. In setup A and setup B, where I tried one-core, two-core, and four-core mask, there was no noticeable improvement in performance. Even with the higher clocked frequency in setup B, the different in core mask did not offer noticeable improvement. Studying the task manager and analyzing the load of 1 WoW instance, there are times where the load would split across the number of cores specified in the core mask. But when you add up the different core utilizations, it will always equal to about one core at full utilization.

In reference to your comment, a test case we can build to check and see if lowering the CPU frequency and testing it against different core mask. See if there is any difference in performance or see if the WoW application will split it's load among the different core mask to maintain a certain level performance. Those would be very interesting results.

You referenced that 1 WoW instance on 1 core with a 30fps fixed rate rendering resulted in 50% core utilization on that one core. Your fixed rate fps setting is probably the one that is producing that result. You are limiting your graphics card to the amount of information it will process and as result of this the GPU requires a lesser amount of information from the CPU hence the lower CPU utilization. If you were to remove the fixed rate fps setting, you would see similar results stated earlier in the guide. The settings I used (for 1 WoW instance) were:
for the CPU:
WoW1 - SET processAffinityMask "15"

for the GPU:
Video Settings -> Resolution Tab:
Resolution:1920x1200 (Wide)
Multisampling:24-bit color 24-bit depth 8x multisample
Refresh:60Hz
Vertical Sync:Unchecked
Hardware Cursor:Checked
Reduce Input Lag:Unchecked
Windowed Mode:Checked
Maximized:Unchecked
Video Settings -> Effects Tab:
Video Quality:Custom (Everything high minus the Shadow Quality: Low)

[vchi]

and the test location was Dalaran. Test was runned for about 10 minutes standing in one of the major intersections within the city. CPU utilization for the 4-core mask was between 20-30%. Try the above settings, disable the frame rate limit and try the different 1-core, 2-core, and 4-core masks. You will probably get similar results with the CPU utilization.

Getting to your second comment about the Memory, application memory usage is to some extent not affected by the OS settings. I believe caching is not included in the calculation of the WoW application memory usage (I will need to google the Internet on Vista caching system to verify.) but as a separate stat. Yes, WoW quality settings does have a strong affect on memory usage and was pointed out in a test case later on in the guide. I did go in-depth about the two different settings and compared the difference in memory usage. The thing I did forgot to add was WoW addons affecting memory usage which I will add to the guide in the next revision or the following revision after that.

As to the page file, all these test were done with the page file set to the maximum size recommended by the Vista OS. As to whether or not turning off the page file will affect actual application memory usage, it will probably increase the memory usage due to not being able to page certain parts of the application memory to the page file (Need to find reference or link to this and verify in a test case).

Now whether or not it is recommended to turn off the page (you referred to it as swap) file completely, I recommend not to do that. Certain applications are dependent on the page file for proper operation. Yes, there are certain applications that will run fine without it and your mileage will vary on applications you run (or crash).

Another good test case would be to test and see if reducing / disabling the page file would affect performance and stability of the OS and the WoW application. The next test case with the page file setting is to see if reported application memory changes.

As for the minimum memory vs range of memory, I will change that to 1 GB.

Getting to your third comment about NPU, I did measure the network bandwidth usage and it bounced between 10-60Kbps range to upwards of 100Kbps-150Kbps range but this is also dependent on which WoW addon you use and I need to add that to the next revision of the wiki. Settings used was similar to the above core mask test and the same location. You reference 1 WoW instance uses about 3KBps which translates into 24Kbps (reference for some of the readers, 8 bits = 1 byte. Capital "B" notation is usually referenced as a byte. while lowercase "b" is usually references as a bit.). Now 24Kbps is not really close to 56Kbps but close enough for this example and I use 56Kbps as a basic (generic and rounded up to something that people could recognize as a basic tier of service) unit of network bandwidth. I was not insinuating that 56Kbps was a telephone line, I was using it as a generic unit of network bandwidth.

Getting to your fourth comment about the OS, I do reference the reasons later on in the guide as information for those interested in learning more about it.

Getting to your fifth comment about UML, I was planning to go somewhere with it but I haven't finished adding/editing the last part of the guide.

Getting to your sixth comment about CPU Bound Observation 1, I'm adding more stuff to that sections and the reason why this information is relevant was to point out that CPU frequency has a strong affect on framerates. Referencing the three websites that had conducted performance test with the three different versions of WoW shows this. But I am still in the process of adding more to this section.

Your last comment about downgrading the memory from 800MHz to 400MHZ, I will agree to a certain extent about memory speed is important in 3D rendering applications. However, for certain applications and certain video games, this is not the case. Now depending on the programming of the application, some / most of the 3D graphics pipeline rendering is actually performed on the GPU (depends on which one you have). The textures or any related graphic items needed would be placed within the GPU node. Coders would try to limit transactions crossing between the GPU and CPU nodes. Some parts of the system memory would be used kind like a caching zone for graphic related items not needed or if there was not enough room on the GPU node to begin with. The cases where speed of the system memory starts playing a role is when you are talking about CAD or modeling programs where it's mainly dependent on the CPU and system memory. However, with the introduction of the CUDA programming language and/or changes in the 3D programming languages (etc.), the lines separating the CPU from the GPU are getting murky and application performance becomes less concrete as to which component is limiting it.

Another case is depending on the setup and whether or not it has an integrated memory controller (and the multi-tier caching scheme) may explain the difference between the individual you referenced as having a performance increase in fps vs setup A where the memory speed was lowered from 667MHz to 400MHz. In setup A, I did pull out the 400MHz memory to see if there was a difference, but there was no noticeable improvement in framerates. And could you provide the link to the individual who had a fps increase due to faster RAM?

You referenced that your system was a quad core running at 2.66GHz, is this a core 2 based or the new Core i7 based series. What are the specs on your machine and what kind of software settings adjustments have you made above the default settings. A good case test would be test a Core i7 system (test if the integrated memory controller plays a big role in performance, if the new multi-tier cache is affected by different memory speeds and whether or not hyperthreading affects performance on a small vs heavy WoW loads). These test cases, would provide valuable information and better inform the readers of this site.