Howto: Increase multiboxing loading times on single computer. Up to 300-800% faster loading times.

[moosejaw]

I think his registration got fouled up from the website switch. I have used that utility from that site. it is legit.

[jak3676]

Should be a good way to save space too. Not very important for most users, but by doing this (and deleting/moving backups off disk) you can probaby squeeze multiple installs into a 32GB SSD; maybe get all 5 into a 64GB SSD?

[Ualaa]

When I originally looked at Symbolic Links, I could not get the Script to work.
In the same thread, another user recommended that program on that site.

As far as creating the links and such, it worked fine for me.
I did have to download a couple of files from the microsoft site, as recommended on that site.

Twice I had patching issues with the SymLink, and have actually gone back to one install.
The symlink was a slight boost for me, which was nice, but two reinstalls sucked.

The first time I patched, but did not break the SymLinks and 4 copies would not patch.
Copying the entire patched folder over the four that would not patch broke the game somehow.

The second time, I broke the symlinks and patched the first install.
Then created new symlinks from the patched folder.
I got a red error message on all accounts at that point, which would not let me enter my username or password.

Aside from patching issues, the symlink was good.
The site above is good anyway, or was about a year ago.

[heyaz]

How in the hell, with that rig, with a raid 0 setup with those hard drives, does it take 37 seconds to load Dalaran?

My PC has about half that juice, with a single SATA drive, and it takes about 10 seconds...

Still, I guess I could reduce it to 3 seconds with your fix

[Pummelled]

I have five wow folders all symlinked off the one main folder.

Works well until you need to patch. Then it can be a pain in the arse.

Easiest way to do it, is to Patch the main folder, copy it, delete the data, WTF, etc folders and paste yourself four clean wow folders.

Copy the WTF & WDB folders from your drone accounts and paste them into each folder. Then symlink the data folder from the main into each drone folder. Personally, I symlink the interface folder also, I just think its cleaner.

This does work well. My loading times are very, very quick.

I like it just because its clean as....

[Owltoid]

Using my RiData SSD I load 5 clients of Dalaran in about 3 seconds.

You don't need raid 0 fast hard drives, you don't need striped SSDs, you just need a relatively cheap version (Intel is probably overkill) that has fast read times. Only put WoW (or other games that only read with minimal writing) and you'll be dandy.

[Catamer]

hmm, I run all 5x copies of wow from one directory.
I don't have any special key bindings on any of my alts so there was no need for the multiple copies of wow. I use an SSD for my games so my loads times very quick there too.

[jak3676]

There seems to be a bit on confusion here.

When you symlink your wow folders (except you exclude your /interface and /wtf directories), you should get the exact same performance as though you were running mulitple copies from the same executable. Because that's exactly what you are doing, it's just that you don't see it that way on the front end. But it works this way because that's exactly what the back end (behind the OS) sees. A symlink isn't much more than a shortcut that your OS knows how to work with.

As for the performace you can gain by doing this - it's really going to depend on your hard drive. (How full is it? How much Cache? What's the spindle rate?) It's still not going to be as quick as just loading 1 copy of WoW - even though they are linked and at least partially cached, you still need to load parts of the file into memory 5x times.


So why symlink at all?

Short version is that you get both the benifits of seperate installs and running from the same folder at the same time. The downside is the maintenence you need to do to maintain the symlink on patch day.

It's faster and takes up less space than having multiple installs in seperate folders - even if you have them all on seperate drives. (You can read the same file 5x times quicker that you can read 5x seperate files - even if they are all on seperate hard drives.)

But unlike simply running the same executable 5x times you can keep seperate hard copies of any files that you may want. I'm still not totally sold on why you would want to have 5x seperate /interface directories, but you can do it if you want to (Do some addons cause problems attempting to write back to the same file at the same time?) I'm also not sold on the need for seperate /WTF directories. Nothing should cause overwrite errors when you run from 1 source because every seperate account gets its own directory within the /WTF folder.

So if we don't really need seperate /WTF folders and we don't need seperate /interface folders - then there really is no point to symlinking at all - just run the same executable five times. Maybe I'm spoiled by keyclone a bit here because keyclone will remember the display settings and usernames of the different accounts for me. I guess not everyone does that though.

If you aren't sold on the idea of doing this with a 3rd party program, you can do this all from the command line yourself. Check out this thread http://www.dual-boxing.com/showthread.php?t=23398 or this one http://www.dual-boxing.com/showthrea...6229#post56229

Thoughts? Discuss please - I'll still fully admit that I'm still new to this.

[Lax]

I have to agree with jak3676 about the confusion thing. It's amazing to me how many people use multiple folders, and symlink them, because they think they are going to get better performance than using a single folder. When I ask someone why they want to use multiple folders and they tell me it's for performance reasons, I know there's serious misinformation going around (not that I had any question whether there was or not).

The sole reason to use multiple folders is to use different configurations, NOT for performance. You're symlinking to achieve the performance (and ease of patching?) of a single folder. And depending on the multiboxing solution you are using, you don't need multiple folders to use different configurations.

That said, if you want the benefit of different configurations, and are not using a solution that provides different configurations without using multiple folders, THEN this method is a good way to mitigate the performance loss of using multiple folders.

[Ualaa]

When I was using SymLinks, I had it set up like this:

Parent Folder --- > WoW A
--- > WoW B
--- > WoW C
--- > WoW D
--- > WoW E
--- > WoW F

The idea was to only ever patch the parent folder, and to not use that to play any toon with.

WoW A-E were my five box folders, with graphical options down to almost nothing.
The addons were slightly different, with WoW C (tank's account) having a few more then the others.

WoW F was my single box account, which at the time was a Warlock.
This folder had every single option cranked to the maximum.
Unlike the WoW A-E folders, I did not add -nosound to the end of this executable.

Different settings is the main benefit.
In the original SymLink thread, the consensus was a SymLink set up was faster then five folders or everything from one folder. In my case either this was not true, or the difference was too marginal to notice.

I had a bunch of issues patching twice.
One install works fine for me.
I miss some of the eye candy now, but run my raider (rogue) and boxing teams all at minimal settings.