SSD performance in WoW dissected

[Sam DeathWalker]

Overall Statistics

World of Warcraft: Cataclysm: Gameplay
Elapsed Time
05:19
Read Operations
245
Write Operations
581
Data Read
2.86 MB
Data Written
31.42 MB
Disk Busy Time
0.12 s
Average Data Rate
276.91 MB/s

World of Warcraft: Catalysm looks more similar to Crysis 2 when it comes to gameplay. The majority of operations are sequential writes. The key difference from Crysis 2 is transfer size, as there’s a greater variety in WoW due to the game’s file structure.

This workload, however, reflects a very specific style of play: mainly, running around a single zone running quests and interacting with the environment. Just bear in mind that it might not be as representative of end-game raiding or flying around between zones, loading new textures on-demand.

I/O Trends:

• 82% of all operations are sequential
• 70% of all operations occur at a queue depth of one
• 38% 4 KB, 28% 128 KB, 9% 16 KB, 8% 8 KB

Well kinda usless information if they are saying there are 15X times the number of writes then reads. Loading new texTures on-demand is what we need to really know ....

But ya wow is mostly random reads (during gameplay running around in org) of 4K chunks.