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.
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