Horrible performance bringing in the 5th toon

[Ghallo]

Generally I've been 5 boxing with 2 machines. A decent 4 core and an older AMD. I put the main on the AMD and had the 4 core setup with 1 core per toon. My older machine has been slowly dying and I decided I would try to toss the 5th toon onto my 4 core. Wow... framerates drop to a crawl. Porting into Dal is a 4 minute lagfest. Can't even move.

I've tried a couple of configurations - having the "Main" share with 1/2/4 cores (to see how the load was distributed). Oddly, dropping any 1 toon seems to make my performance acceptable so I must be hitting some invisible threshold (even when I'm dropping a toon from a smaller window it makes a huge difference). Am I doing this wrong? I really am not in the mood to buy more hardware - would I get better results from removing the SLI on my video cards (so the processing is seperated by video card? What about setting the "alts" to share 3 cores and leaving one core for just the main? Any other ideas?

Thanks

[Fef]

How much RAM do you have on your machine ? You might be getting out of the 1GB per client soft spot.

[Ghallo]

Sorry, Vista Ultimate 64bit - 8Gb of Ram
Proc: Q6600 2.4 Ghz

[Drommon]

Try this. Have windows manage your wow clients on all 4 cores. Set the affinity to 15 for each client and then all 4 cores are engaged for all 5 clients. I did this and saw a large performance increase. In addition, on my machine and settings 5 wow clients take up ~6 GB of ram. A 64 bit OS helps too. I don't know what your display hardware is like but if you have 2 monitors and 2 cards you can look into InnerSpace for multiple GPU management which will also help with performance.

But first, check your ram usage under task manager. I think that may be the culprit. If you have enough then try running all clients on all 4 cores.

Drommon

[Drommon]

Sorry, Vista Ultimate 64bit - 8Gb of Ram
Proc: Q6600 2.4 Ghz

That should handle 5 with no problems. I really ecourage you to set all clients on all cores, you will see a boost. Also your read times from your drives might be poor.

Drommon

[Ghallo]

Hardware RAID for performance, but I will try all 4 cores and see if that makes a difference. Thanks!

[Ualaa]

Before my upgrade, I was running 5 clients on:

Windows Vista 64-bit, Home Premium, Service Pack 3.
Q6600 at 2.4ghz (stock)
8gb ddr @ 800mhz
ATI Sapphire 4870 X2
150gb Raptor (10,000rpm)
All 4 cores on every wow.
One wow folder.


Dalaran was a bit choppy, and epic ground mounts would lose follow consistently, but on foot follow always worked fine. Hearthing there did not take longer then anywhere else. Numlock on, with epic flyers would lose follow too, but stop and go worked fine.

[thinus]

Similar machine and I am getting follow drops in AV with Crusader Aura. Not sure if the following distance places them outside the aura range. It also gets laggy in big standoffs, 60+ players AoEing etc. I've been steadily turning settings down to see if I can make a performance impact.

I have all 4 clones running on core 3 and 4 with everything else on core 1 and 2. I'll try switching all of them to all cores and see if it makes any difference.

I tried WG once, only 4 got into it, it was pretty bad performance wise. Not sure if it was because one of my characters was stuck in AV while the rest was in WG or whether it would have struggled with all 5 in WG as well. My gut feel is the latter.

[Nighthawk38]

I am having the same problem. Same system configuration as the OP. Let's pretend I have NO technical knowledge... how do I "share" my Wow programs across all cores ? I have no idea where to even check and see if this is happening. I know when I open all 5 accts, my FPS drops down to like 4.3 thanks in advance

[Fef]

Maybe not related, but I had an issue with cores and affinity. Windows consider each core as two cores because of hyperthreading on my machine, so basically, my first set-up was using half the physical cores.