Single or many WoW installs?

[Sarduci]

Hello everyone!

I thought I'd make my first post something of interest on the performance front.

So, has there been any technical performance measurements taken of disk drive performance on single vs many installs?

If so, I have not been able to find it as of yet and would appreciate a link to it.

If not, I'd like to know if this is the proper part of the forum for this as I have some time to do system profiles this weekend when I'm on call since I'll be stuck at home.

Also, as a side note, I've not seen any study of read vs write disk access either to see which side of the disk I/O is higher. If anyone has any hard numbers for that I'd appreciate it.

Sarduci

[Diamndzngunz]

I have multiple installs. Seems more easy for me to manage addons and macros. Just depends on the person.

[opt]

Multiple folders is the way togo, just make 1 copy of wow you like and are happy with then just copy/paste if a couple of times
Plus the fact u dont need to type in your usernames each and every time!

[Ughmahedhurtz]

If you're a bit computer savvy, check this out: NTFS junction points

Works like a charm.

[Droopz]

Multiple folders is the way togo, just make 1 copy of wow you like and are happy with then just copy/paste if a couple of times
Plus the fact u dont need to type in your usernames each and every time!

I run my main from 1 director on 1 drive and my 4 alts share a single directory on the other. Using keyclone to launch them I don't have to type in user names. Plus having the alts all sharing the 1 directory means I only have to setup most of the macros once.

I experimented with 5 seperate directories but zoning just killed me. Changing to this system i have now it blinks through load screen nice and fast.

[Sarduci]

NTFS junction points[/url]

Works like a charm.

Thanks for pointing that out. Most if not 80%+ of the data I work with is normally unique so I've never had to do look into something like that to save space; my normal motto is: Add another 14TB to the SAN! This sounds easy enough to do. I'll add it to my list of things to look at.

From my understanding of the software itself, all of the unique data per account and per toon is saved in a sub folder under \wtf\account folder. So far I've had no issues after a whopping 2 hours of play time with file read or write access errors (mental note to turn on file system audits) but I am not currently using anything other than the stock software.

Checking soft link performance vs single install vs 2, 3, 4, or 5 installs shouldn't be hard to do. Profiling for RAID0 or RAID1 performance should also be easy enough to do, but unfortunately I'd have to reload my OS to switch my controller to RAID from ACHI to look at that along with finding another disk drive.....

Oh well, at least I'll have something to do this weekend.

[glo]

I can't imagine you are going to see much if any difference in performance with multiple folders.

Keeping the wow files defragged and on the outer partition of your hard drive will definitely increase performance.

[Mudd]

Disk seek times are normally the load time killer for games like this. Defragging and putting it on the out edge of the partition will help increase bandwidth, but 5 folders worth of wow is still more seeks than necessary.

[Notes]

Running my 4 adds from 1 WoW folder, user names get added by Keyclone. Main got its own WoW folder on another HD. This results in having the same loading times as I have with just 1 character = My loads own other players loading times when on a ship or into a BG

[Feehza]

Two wow-folders for 5 Chars
1. char 1
2. char 2-4


When i start the toons, my start.bat copies the induvidual config-file to config.cfg and the induvidual maximizer-file to maximizer.ini.

I have much more performance than with 5 folders.