Quote Originally Posted by zanthor View Post
The processor may be an issue, but you'll find that 4 boxing with 4gb is fine, 5 boxing with 4gb can create exactly the issue you are describing - particularly in crowded areas.

I was able to get away with 5 boxing a single system into TBC but anywhere crowded like Org or Shattrah would play hell on it. Once Lich King released it's not feasible to even 5 box remote areas on 4gb of ram... especially if you are on a 32 bit OS.
I haven't yet hit Northrend with my team, I'm just now breaking L55. However, on my setup I get decent enough framerates in Badlands (I'm hearthed to shatt for the portals).

Though, I use a memory-limiting feature.

I do suffer horribly when I 4-box AV. To compensate I shut off all AddOns, perform an "End Process Tree" on explorer, etc. Ultimately I find I'm CPU-bound. With 4GB of memory, 3GB are available.

With WoW "tuned-down" (lowest effects, 1024x768 windowed) I'm not swapping unnecessarily. The tools I use display the physical memory commit for each instance I'm running, on average they report at less-than 400MB physical. If I pull up perf-counters for page activity, once loaded into a zone, I don't really swap at all. Most of the Disk IO I suffer is related to texture loads (filemon, sysinternals.)

5-boxing with 4GB is doable, but I agree it gets dangerously close to entering swap-hell. Before adding a memory-limiter and trimming back all of my AddOns I would occasionally enter swap-hell and it would last for 20 seconds, which is simply unacceptable. Memory limiting at least distributes the swap-out cost over-time, ensuring that the only data in memory is data that WoW has been needing for normal operation. When I first began multiboxing I ran two instances, and each one ate 1.2GB of RAM, I learned over time that WoW with medium or high effects and/or a "bad" collection of AddOns can result in horrible memory utilization.