Deteriorating performance

[Pocalypse]

When I first got my computer early 2009, it worked liked a charm. I could run around Dalaran with 5 guys and barely any lag.

Now, if I try to go to Dalaran, I get a ton of graphical lag, and have to go 10 feet, stop, wait, another 10 feet, etc.
Playing in the rest of Northrend is doable, but not much fun. Flying around on epics is out.
The computer, even outside of WoW, is just generally slow.

I can't really figure out why. It's specs are still top of the line.

Here are the specs:

Core i7 940 @ 2.93ghz
12gb DDR3 ram @ 1066mhz
2x GTX 280 (non SLI for wow)
Vista Ultimate 64bit
C Drive and main wow folders on a regular 7200rpm drive
WoW data folders on a 60gb OCZSSD2-1SLD60G (which looking at it now, is bottom spec for SSDs: 155MB read, 90MB write).


What I'm thinking of doing for improvements is the following:
Replace my C drive with an Intel X-25M SSD. I'd use this for both the OS and WoW folders, I'd rather have a big storage drive in place of two SSDs.
Completely format and get Windows 7 64bit.

Does anyone have any other suggestions as to what I can do to improve performance?
Any specific tests I can run before formatting to see what's wrong?

[crowdx]

Some thoughts, have you got a virus scanner?
1. you may have a virus which is hogging resources
2. a virus scanner can also hog resources while playing, many scanners have a "game mode" which basically stops the scanner from doing a lot of the normal background scanning it does and so reduces the resources it is using BUT also would reduce the protection.

Also worth checking to see if your C drive with OS is getting defragged regularly.

[Pocalypse]

I use AVG free. It's fully updated, and scans pretty often, so I don't think I have a virus.

I defragged about a month ago, but I'll do it again to see if it has any difference.
Edit: Apparently my defrag is on a schedule, and runs every wednesday. And it also defragged my SSD, which is bad. Could that cause some of my issues?

Generally, my computer uses about 7gb of ram. I think this is due to prefetch, I can't figure out anything else that would cause it.
When I'm running wow, it jumps to about 10gb used.

[HPAVC]

Nothing on the affinity side of things changed? By guess is that you should review the config settings here, perhaps when a patch occurred the affinity settings changed.

How is single and then dual boxing in Dal?

If you load of 5 characters and only play one (zone the four them into stockades or rfc quick and let them sit there for a moment to settle down the system). How is Dal or Northrend flying with the single character? There should be nothing occurring on those 4 slaves after the zone in.

If you zone one character in and then a moment later do the others, how much faster are the other characters? If its not visibly significant there is some sort of caching loss occurring, that load should still be cached.

Do you run any chatty addons like carbonite that deal with zone positioning quest status of guild, friends and what not? I would disable that during the above testing.

After load up your guys, use taskmgr or procexplorer to see what the actual affinity settings of wow.exe's are.

You might want to load one wow, then another and see how much of a memory hit you are getting. That memory usage is pretty large for 5 characters sitting idle. Baring a lot of addons, perhaps they are buffering data files separately. But that is more of a zone in lag than a performance hit.

[Pocalypse]

Thanks, I'll try all of those tonight.

I use questhelper on all 5, I'll try disabling that.

Each process takes about 1.2-1.4gb of ram if I recall correctly.

[ILikeTwins]

There are some things that make windows bog down ike cleaning out your internet browser cache. Since you mention that it is slow outside of windows then it is probably not your wow. You could also check to see if need driver updates for your video etc. After a couple of years alot of computer savvy people reinstall windows since it can just bog down from bloated registry and corrupted files. Your system should be screaming fast.

Make sure to not defrag the ssd since that will lower the lifespan of it. Use the TRIM utility if you ssd supports it since ssds get significantly slower the closer to full they get. I think you need to make sure to have at least 20% space free on it for best performance.

[Ughmahedhurtz]

Here's something you might try to see if a program is sucking up your resources:

• Right-click your taskbar and select "Start Task Manager"
• Select the "Processes" tab
• Go to "View" --> "Select Columns"
• Check the boxes for Base Priority, Handles and Threads
• Click OK

Now, a few things to look for:

• What's the "Physical Memory %" reporting in the status bar at the bottom?
• If you click on "CPU" to sort by that, what are your top 5 processes usually? And do any of them suck up more than 1-2% aside from WoW?
• If you sort by memory, what are your top 10 memory hog processes?
• If you sort by Handles or Threads, are there any that take up more than a few thousand? MS Office (Outlook/word/etc.) is bad about it but not that big of a deal as you can close them.
• Anything over 3-4k handles is abnormal and will cause slowdowns. One exception would be MySQL or Postgresql server processes.
• Make sure you don't have anything screwball in terms of priority settings. Everything except Taskmgr.exe, firewall programs and (possibly) mouse tweak programs (like katmouse) should all be "normal" priority. You can also set your web browser to "idle" priority to see if that helps. If it does, it indicates that your browser is probably running an offensive app like a flash movie/game or some other active app that isn't CPU-friendly.

I've often found things going on like broken/leaking apps by monitoring Task Manager when I see issues like you are. Hope this helps!

Cheers,
Ugh

[Akoko]

You definitely don't want QuestHelper on when you're multiboxing. It's a huge resource hog.

[Pocalypse]

Ugh, here are my stats when idle:

• Physical memory used: 59% (about 7gb)
  I cannot figure out where this is going. The best I can come up with is superfetch. The highest memory process is svchost taking about 450mb usually, and one of the services it lists is superfetch.
• Nothing takes a high cpu % except wow.
• Top memory hogs (except wow): svchost.exe, chrome.exe, svchost.exe, (iTunes if I have it running). The rest are <100mb.
• The only process above 3k handles is System, which I assume is normal. The next one down is svchost at 1300.
• Only high priority process are dwm.exe, winlogon.exe and wininit.exe.

The only bad thing from that list is my physical memory used. As I said, it's always at least 50% (6gb), even when idle. With wow on, it approaches 90%. It's been like this for a while, I haven't been able to figure out why.

ILikeTwins, I use chrome and firefox exclusively. Do those still cause slowdowns with a high cache?

HPAVC, I'm going to test out all the wow stuff now.

Thanks a lot for the help everyone!

[Ughmahedhurtz]

Ugh, here are my stats when idle:

• Physical memory used: 59% (about 7gb)
  I cannot figure out where this is going. The best I can come up with is superfetch. The highest memory process is svchost taking about 450mb usually, and one of the services it lists is superfetch.
• Nothing takes a high cpu % except wow.
• Top memory hogs (except wow): svchost.exe, chrome.exe, svchost.exe, (iTunes if I have it running). The rest are <100mb.
• The only process above 3k handles is System, which I assume is normal. The next one down is svchost at 1300.
• Only high priority process are dwm.exe, winlogon.exe and wininit.exe.

The only bad thing from that list is my physical memory used. As I said, it's always at least 50% (6gb), even when idle. With wow on, it approaches 90%. It's been like this for a while, I haven't been able to figure out why.

ILikeTwins, I use chrome and firefox exclusively. Do those still cause slowdowns with a high cache?

HPAVC, I'm going to test out all the wow stuff now.

Thanks a lot for the help everyone!

I don't see anything obvious here. The large memory usage is probably Vista doing its SuperFetch thing.

One other thing I might suggest is making sure your GPU, CPU and power supply fans are all blown out and dust-free (or close to it). Heat can cause modern CPUs/GPUs to throttle themselves, which would result in your experience.