Quote Originally Posted by Mukade View Post
There is no reason at all to use symlinked folders any more. You can get access to unlimited macros on each character through either ISBoxer or Jamba, so you don't need to have a seperate set of per account macros for each character.
What the hell are you talking about? Symlinks have nothing to do with macros, of course everyone should be using them!

If you have 5 copies of the game they all grab for their own separate \Data\World.MPQ, thats 5 reads no useful cache. If they grab for the same \Data\World.MPQ thats 1 read 4 cached reads. This works after MPQ is mounted (its essentially a user mode virtual file system), not just the initial file mounting.

There is a limit on just how much is going to be buffered by the os, so those 5 reads no useful cache are actually blowing out your other cached disk objects. In the end this means your running on 1/5th of the disk cache you would normally have 5 boxing.

In a word ... deduplication; not for space savings, but for reads performance.

That said the the other customary symlinks give ease to managing patches, upgrades,addons / screen shots and what not for the slaves. Depending on how the user has things setup.