Hardware question!

[chazz]

Hey everyone!

Not sure if this is the right section but I'm taking a chance.
I just started quad-boxing 4 shamans tonight after seeing it being done in AV and thengot the link here from that guy.
The idea of it is something I've been wanting to do since way back in the day when I played Anarchy Online and in FFXI I actually tried doing it by using a certain software made for that game which created hooks and classes to use for programming smaller things for it (people mainly did botting but I never were into cheating, I always just wanted to control more characters), but never got anywhere since I'm no programmer by heart and because everyone who had the talent thought my idea sucked.
At this point in time as far as I knew software solutions for multi-boxing didn't exist, but I heard of people later in DaoC who did it using several computers etc and that was never an option for me.
Well, enough with the prologue, now it does exist and I'm in love! :love:

I first set everything up for three new accounts because the store had some trouble with the fourth one so it took an hour extra or so before I got it (buying keys online) and without actually thinking about it I had three instances of WoW running with all details etc on the highest level... and it worked, smoothly aswell!
But then when I got the fourth instance the fps dropped immensely and I really feel the lag, especially when I went to Orgrimmar just a few minutes ago, it felt like I was back on my old station where everything would freeze for a second or so time and time again.
So I went out and pressed ctrl+alt+del to check my CPU usage and found out it was only using 50%, so that clearly wasn't the problem.
Now I don't know how to check GPU usage, but the memory was at about 95% or more, using 1.8GB of 2GB.
Is it fair to just assume memory is the problem here and that another 1GB stick will solve it?
I don't know if memory has effect on fps? Always kind of thought that was GPU and nothing else.
I lowered the resolution on my slaves and set all graphic options to low except for terrain distance and it basically had no effect at all, I mean I think I noticed a sliiiiiiiight improvement but it was so slight that who really knows...
So that really got me convinced it's the memory, but I don't want to spend money before I've heard some more opinions on the matter, especially if someone knowledgable has input to offer, because I'm a poor student and just running these four accounts forces me to sacrifice some things each month.

I'm running a QuadCore 6600, 8800 GTX nVidia and 2GB DDR2 memory.
My main character is set on 1680x1050 resolution and everything on high while my slaves run everything on low and 1280x720 resolution.

Long post, but I cincerely thank anyone who takes the time to read and respond!

[nogbog]

Sounds to me like a harddisk problem,
Well... not so much a problem, but you cannot run that many WoW instances off the same harddisk without expecting a ton of lag.

[Freddie]

Chazz, two things. First, cpu affinity. I don't know if this is true, but people on the WoW forums say that by default, WoW runs only on cores 0 and 1 of a quad core. That would be consistent with the 50% cpu use you're seeing. So the first thing to try is setting the cpu affnity manually so your WoWs use different cores. You can do that from the Processes tab in Task Manager or with many of the boxing programs that people talk about here including my own.

Second, it sounds like your problem is not enough memory. When a PC runs out of RAM it begins to page. That means it begins shuffling info back and forth from RAM to the hard disk. When that happens, you notice a sudden sharp drop in performance and stuttering in games. RAM is cheap now, and you can't go wrong by going up to 4 gigs.

[Kissell13]

Sounds to me like a harddisk problem,
Well... not so much a problem, but you cannot run that many WoW instances off the same harddisk without expecting a ton of lag.

Actually I run all 5 instances of wow off of a single sata hdd.
Two physical installs, 1 for main and the other for the alts(run 4 times from the same dir

I have no problems with lag.

[chazz]

Yeah it's not a HDD problem, I run main on raptor (10k rpm) and slaves on a regular (7200 rpm?) and I've tried putting one and two slaves on the raptor aswell to ease it up for my regular HDD, makes no difference.
Also yes I have set up cpu affinity using KeyClone, didn't know about the 0 and 2 cores only so maybe I should change that for two of my instances.

But alright so I'm probably not wrong assuming memory then?
Probably going to buy some more either way, but from what I understand buying more than 1GB more (3GB total) is a waste if I'm not running Vista 64-bit? Cause I'm running Vista 32-bit.

[nogbog]

Sounds to me like a harddisk problem,
Well... not so much a problem, but you cannot run that many WoW instances off the same harddisk without expecting a ton of lag.

Actually I run all 5 instances of wow off of a single sata hdd.
Two physical installs, 1 for main and the other for the alts(run 4 times from the same dir

I have no problems with lag.

Wait till you start running out of disk space!

When i'm down to my last 15Gb of my 200Gb disk, things start to get super choppy.

[Kissell13]

Wait till you start running out of disk space!

When i'm down to my last 15Gb of my 200Gb disk, things start to get super choppy.

OIC. I shouldnt have that problem hopefully. I have a separate 500gb drive just for game installs. Currently I only have wow and 3 others installed. So I should be good to go.

[Freddie]

Also yes I have set up cpu affinity using KeyClone, didn't know about the 0 and 2 cores only so maybe I should change that for two of my instances.

What did you set them to? You need to assign the different instances of WoW to different cores. You could assign the first two WoWs to 0 and 1, and the last two WoWs to 2 and 3. Or assign each WoW to a separate core.

But alright so I'm probably not wrong assuming memory then?

That's my first guess but you won't know till you try.

Probably going to buy some more either way, but from what I understand buying more than 1GB more (3GB total) is a waste if I'm not running Vista 64-bit? Cause I'm running Vista 32-bit.

A 32-bit OS can't use the full four gigs but it may be able to use more than three. The exact amount depends on drivers, the amount of video ram on your video card, etc. (The higher your video ram, the less system ram will be usable.) For example the PC I'm using now is running 32 bit XP with 4 gigs of system RAM, and the OS can see 3582 MB of that RAM. 4 gigs is 4096 MB so I'm getting use of 510 MB of the last gig or about half of it.

[chazz]

What did you set them to? You need to assign the different instances of WoW to different cores. You could assign the first two WoWs to 0 and 1, and the last two WoWs to 2 and 3. Or assign each WoW to a separate core.

A 32-bit OS can't use the full four gigs but it may be able to use more than three. The exact amount depends on drivers, the amount of video ram on your video card, etc. (The higher your video ram, the less system ram will be usable.) For example the PC I'm using now is running 32 bit XP with 4 gigs of system RAM, and the OS can see 3582 MB of that RAM. 4 gigs is 4096 MB so I'm getting use of 510 MB of the last gig or about half of it.

I set all my WoW instances on different CPU, the main on 0 and then the others on 1, 2 and 3 respectively.
So the higher my video card ram the lower 'regular' RAM will be used? My graphics card is 756 I believe (unless I'm talking about something else, not really too bright when it comes to details like this on hardware).
Anyway, I'll check just how cheap it is and if it's cheap enough I'll buy 2GB on Thursday and see if that fixes my problem!

[Freddie]

I set all my WoW instances on different CPU, the main on 0 and then the others on 1, 2 and 3 respectively.

Sounds good. Maybe somebody tested different combo's and there's something else that works even better -- I don't know -- but that sounds reasonable.

So the higher my video card ram the lower 'regular' RAM will be used? My graphics card is 756 I believe (unless I'm talking about something else, not really too bright when it comes to details like this on hardware).

That's right. Each piece of memory (whether regular RAM or memory on a video card) needs to have a unique ID number so Windows can talk to it. Sort of like phone numbers. With 32-bit numbers, you can only count up to a little more than 4 billion. So that's the maximum number of pieces of memory the OS can talk to. Every byte of memory on your video card uses up one of those numbers, so there are fewer numbers available for regular RAM.

Anyway, I'll check just how cheap it is and if it's cheap enough I'll buy 2GB on Thursday and see if that fixes my problem!

That's what I would do too. Good luck.