one vs multiple wow folders

[Raigirin]

Got intrigued by the symlink possibilities and right now I am symlinking the data folder which has improved my loading times and reduced lag in major cities.
(I still have a separate interface folder for each instance.)

Since I am running on a quad core machine, I distribute the cores manually between the instances. (set affinity)
Before I started to do this all 5 instances had affinity set to core 1&2 only!
This has also helped performance wise.

[Ualaa]

WoW seems to be somewhat optimized for two cores.

I'd either go two cores per wow account, with some overlap.
Or just have every core on every account and let windows allocate CPU resources.

[Raigirin]

that is exactly what I thought .
when trying to allocate cores via a bat file, the wow instances always "fell back" to core 1 & 2, so I assumed Blizz forced wow on 2 cores for a reason.

Now I run my master instance (all visuals to the max) on cores 1 & 2
and the 4 slaves on cores 3 & 4

(even though 1 instance on each core, with instance 4 and 5 sharing worked well in outlands too)

[aboron]

I use 1 folder for 5 wows on a 32gig ram ssd ( http://www.acard.com.tw/english/fb01...&type1_idno=13 ) and in addition to using a virtual config.wtf, I also do virtual addons.txt - this lets me maintain one addons folder full of everything, and turn them on and off per character or group.