OK so now I want a ram drive

[heyaz]

That's a good question! I don't know if there are some older update files, or if there is a WoW cleanup thingy... I guess it's 25.1GB now that I checked. Not 27GB.

I don't think you need to include *all* of the MPQs, I know one 10 boxer was doing it with 24GB RAM and checked disk access for the files WoW pegs the most, and just symlinked those one by one. Sounds complicated but he said there was a performance increase.

I tried again, without synthetic benchmarks or just "it seems faster" (placebo effect) - I logged on with 10 toons in the middle of Shrine on Illidan, then moved 5 toons out to Vale to do dallies. Started choking quite a bit (there are tons of people in both areas on that server). One client crashed. Restarted with the RAM drive and it was nice and smooth.

For me, I don't want to worry about going to certain areas or engaging in a 40x40 BG and having my machine choke at the worst time. I think the RAM drive is the difference here. CPU/GPU usage wasn't anywhere near maxed out when I was in areas where I/O utilization was too much.

Under light load, you won't notice a difference. If you're in the old world, doing old BGs, in an area without a lot of pandas, the SSD will probably suffice. When you're in Shrine/Vale/Org or 10 boxing in a big BG, it is the difference between the machine choking and a client or two crashing, and things running smoothly. I don't want to have face toons straight down or drop below 10fps or stare at a wall in Undercity to keep it playable.

I need to run some more performance monitoring tools. Could there be other bottlenecks somwhere? ISBoxer even? Who knows. Maybe I could put 32GB worth of crap in the RAM drive and forget about I/O bottlenecks forever.