Symlink Interface folder or no?

[lans83]

I was wondering if there was any downside to setting up each of my 4 account's folders with their own Interface folder for the addons so that they each have their own? Or would it be best on my system to just keep the folder symlinked from my main folder?

[Caspian]

I link it and enable/disable addons per toon per account. Settings are saved in your WTF folder so you don't have issues overwriting any thing if that is your concern.

[Jubber]

What Caspian said. It saves you some space. Nothing is written into those folders. All your specifics are saved to the WTF folder. You can have your own interface folders but there is no real reason to do so.

[puppychow]

its much easier to update addons when you have them symlinked, updating 5 folders worth of addons sucks. i keep wtf\ unsymlinked, but I DO symlink wtf\account, that way I can log into any of my wow chars from any of my wow folders, but each wow folder has its own video/gfx settings and each wow char has its on addons-loaded setting.

[Mikey]

I symlink my add-ons folder for easier updating. It's much easier to disable unwanted add-ons on both main and slave installs than it is to keep add-ons up to date for 4x different addon folders.

[Chorizotarian]

I also simlink and update virtually all of them w/ the Curse Updater. Makes the whole thing incredibly painless.

[Crucial]

yes, for the reason above but as for innerspace/isboxer users, you don't even need to symlink. Just have 1 wow folder and then virtualize your config.wtf for each character. Makes updating addons and patching a no brainer.

[king.pa]

I do simlink lot of folders :
Data, Account & Interface

I'll probably symlink some of my .lua files or even better : symlink the SavedVariables folder (at least on my clones) to simplify the whole configuration and update process.

symlink rock !!

[Otlecs]

I think the original question has been answered (yes, it's best to symlink your interface folder for ease of maintenance), but this has caught my eye:

I do simlink lot of folders :
Data, Account & Interface

If you symlink all this lot (especially the data folder!) then what's the point of multiple installations at all? Surely you're driving all the I/O traffic back to a single physical disk in any case?

It seems to me that symlinking in this way completely defeats the purpose of having multiple installations in the first place.

I'm obviously missing something - what is it?

[softflow]

Otlecs,

While I can't get technical with it as I haven't read up on symlinking in a few months, I can give you my experience. I have a Velociraptor HD and I ran all 5 accounts on 1 machine, in 3 install directories (main1, slave1 & 2, slave3 & 4). I hadn't symlinked and I was noticing lots of long load times hearthing, etc and lost-follows in heavy traffic areas. Once I symlinked my data and interface folders in the 2 slave installs to the main install, all of this virtually disappeared. I never again lost follow in Shat (haven't boxed in WotLK yet) and the longer load times across the toons (addon & data loading basically) returned almost back to the same as when I was soloing.

It's good to have the separate installs so you can assign multiple cores in keyclone, and I'm sure there's other benefits, but you do raise a good question. I would imagine each user would see different results depending on their system setup. For me, symlinking was a huge improvement!