Performance tips from a beginner

[Esca]

I’ve boxed on and off for a long time with 2 or 3 characters, but recently I decided to get pretty serious about running high end content with a full group of 5 characters. This site was a great help in getting everything setup. It was especially easy to find answers regarding tools like Keyclone and lots of macro help. But as a beginner I had a harder time figuring out how to improve my hardware’s performance. There’s a lot of great performance advice but it was harder to find throughout the whole board, so I thought it might be helpful to summarize the performance tips I’ve found so far.

I’m sure this is not a comprehensive list, but it’s what I’ve found so far. I can’t take credit for any of these tips. They can all be found one way or another on this board. I’m just compiling them and adding a few comments.

Maybe performance is a bigger problem for me since I’m running 5 sessions on a laptop as opposed to a desktop setup. I travel a lot for work, so if I wanted to play more often than just on weekends I had to figure a way to use my laptop for gaming. I have a pretty good laptop (dual core 2.33, 4 GB RAM, 7200 RPM drive, Vista Ultimate). At first I just started up 5 sessions of WoW without any changes to my original installation and could play reasonably well, but had some pretty bad lag spikes and would often hear my hard drive screaming in pain. I made the changes below and the difference is huge. Now I never seem to have any performance issues:

1.- Separate your WoW installations: I read several posts about putting WoW in different folders for each session you want to run, but frankly I didn’t even try that since I figured that they would still be fighting over the same physical drive anyways. Since my laptop has a single hard drive, what I did was to make a copy of the WoW installation folder to an 8GB USB pen drive . The WoW folder is about 7 GB after you delete stuff that you no longer need like the patch files and cinematics. I run my main copy of WoW from my hard drive and the four slave sessions from the pen drive. It works great. My laptop runs a lot cooler and I never hear my hard drive complain like it did before.

2.- Crank down the settings on your secondary windows: I have the video settings pretty much maxed out on my main window, but on my secondary windows the settings are almost at their lowest. This includes resolution (1920x1200 for the main vs 1280x800 for the slaves) and all other video settings are lower on the slaves too. Since the main and slaves use separate directories their settings are saved independently. I also deleted all but one mod from the WoW directory used by my slaves.

3.- Set FPS limits: This is incredibly simple and makes an impact right away. I typed the following for my main and one of my slaves:

/console maxfps 50
/console maxfpsbk 15

This will limit your max FPS on the window that has focus to 50. When a window is in the background its FPS will be limited to 15. You can change the numbers to your liking but this worked great for me. You only have to do this once and it will be saved in your WoW’s configuration file. I think Keyclone can manage this for you too, but I did it directly in WoW.

4.- Set CPU Affinity: This didn’t have a noticeable impact for me, so I rolled it back but it might be more noticeable on other systems. In a nutshell, what this does is that for systems with multiple cores, you can specify what processors get used by different sessions. Here are a couple good posts explaining it:

http://www.dual-boxing.com/forums/index.php?page=Thread&postID=21371

http://www.dual-boxing.com/forums/index.php?page=Thread&postID=39414


Just as a final note, I should explain that my focus is PvE. This means I stay on my main window 95% of the time and rarely need to switch to the other windows. This allows me to treat my other sessions as poor stepchildren and minimize their resource consumption as explained in points 1 and 2. If you’re going to do a lot of PvP where your main might be dying often and you have to switch to other windows all the time you might not want to go as far as I did in lowering the settings of the other sessions.

[Wilbur]

I would definately not recommend using a USB drive for running any game from. Flash drives die after a certain amount of writes.

[zanthor]

I would definately not recommend using a USB drive for running any game from. Flash drives die after a certain amount of writes.

Since WoW doesn't spend an amazing amount of time writing data back to the drive I don't see this ever being an issue, pen drives have relatively unlimited read capability.

[Wilbur]

hi2u log files.

[Eteocles]

Patches, cached data, addon variables being saved constantly, moreso if you have a dmg meter/dressing room mod, it writes plenty I'm sure lol; and as wilbur posted, any logfiles such as the patches' patchlog, crash/error dumps, and pretty much any char you ever make creates a folder for it's acct + realm + char in the wdb/wtf folders

[Lorune]

Is there anyone using SSD's in their PC to run wow off ?

If you do, how is the preformance compared to a normal disk ?

Of course i dont mean USB sticks, but real SSD's

[Wilbur]

I don't know of anyone doing it at present, but looking at the benchmarks, using these would be sick

[Lorune]

Considering i am using a single machine setup for running 5 clients at this point. It might be worth the investment, however i think i would need a 64gb one, and they are still fairly pricy (950 euro's).

ah well, perhaps from my vacation money

[jettmartinez]

For what it's worth, I've found I get much much better performance running WoW from the same folder. I'm only running 2 clients, but I want from single digit FPS to around 30 for both clients when I ran them from the same place. No idea why that may be true technically. Maybe something with cachces or something?

[/font]

1.- Separate your WoW installations: I read several posts about putting WoW in different folders for each session you want to run, but frankly I didn’t even try that since I figured that they would still be fighting over the same physical drive anyways. Since my laptop has a single hard drive, what I did was to make a copy of the WoW installation folder to an 8GB USB pen drive . The WoW folder is about 7 GB after you delete stuff that you no longer need like the patch files and cinematics. I run my main copy of WoW from my hard drive and the four slave sessions from the pen drive. It works great. My laptop runs a lot cooler and I never hear my hard drive complain like it did before.