Hardware question!

[chazz]

Alrighty then, I just got home from the PC-store, bought myself 4GB brand new memory and threw the old 2GB out (slower).
Result? Nothing.
Obviously only 50-60% of memory is used now, but it had no effect on my fps at all.
I can open up three instances of wow and run it with 60fps capped at all times basically (maybe not in towns of course, only tried outside, but still) and then when the fourth comes up it drops down to 35 or so and begins to feel choppy/stuttering.
I've set all graphics on my slave on the lowest possible with NO impact AT ALL, I've bought more RAM (4Gb total), I've divided my WoW instances on two HDDs one of them being a 10k rpm raptor and still this happens.
I have no idea what this can be. ?(

To once again state my hardware;
QuadCore 6600
nVidia 8800GTX
DDR2 PC-6400 (800MHz) 4 GB
Raptor 10000 rpm 74GB
Maxtor 7200 rpm 250GB

3 Slaves with all graphics on LOWEST and resolution 1280x720
1 Main with all graphics on High and resolution 1680x1050
Main+Slave1 on Raptor, Slave2+Slave3 on Maxtor

I also have 24mbit connection and noticed how my ms also goes from 40-60 to 200ish when four instances is up (obviously more WoW instances mean a lot more info trafficking, I just thought 150+ ms was quite a hefty amount).

Anyone have any ideas at all?
Oh and also a big thanks Freddie for taking the time to read my posts and try to help me out, noticed I never did thank you.

[Freddie]

Oh and also a big thanks Freddie for taking the time to read my posts and try to help me out, noticed I never did thank you.

You're welcome but I haven't managed to help so ...

How much memory is usable now? I don't have Vista but according to Microsoft's doc's, you can tell by running msinfo32 from the "run" box. You should also be able to tell from TaskManager.

Hmmm. The PC is suddenly running out of something when you launch the fourth WoW, but what? You might be able to tell by comparing TaskManager with three and four WoWs. If you can figure out how to decipher TaskManager's display you can tell when and how much the system begins to page. Paging causes an enormous performance hit.

If you've got broadband and a decent router, it seems unlikely that you're running out of bandwidth. Video memory? Maybe the PC suddenly has to start shuffling graphics back and forth from video memory to system RAM. That's pretty slow. There must be people here with your video card and 4 wow's would could tell you if that's typical.

Well, four ideas.

(1) Try setting cpu affinity so each WoW can run on all four cores. That way Windows is free to schedule them as optimally as possible. When you assign an app to just one core, you prevent Windows from doing things as efficiently as possible. Windows doesn't really schedule app's to cores. It schedules their threads to cores and the scheduling can change from one instant to another.

(2) Try capping the fps of three WoWs to see if that frees up resources. I think the command is /console maxbkfps ##.

(3) Try turning off some Vista background stuff. I don't have Vista so I can't say exactly what but there's info all over the web about that.

(4) Do you have any of the WoW windows open but completely covered by another window? That makes the covered WoW's cpu usage triple.

[Freddie]

P.S. You might want to check the cpu affinity with TaskManager to see if it's really set the way you want.

[chazz]

How much memory is usable now? I don't have Vista but according to Microsoft's doc's, you can tell by running msinfo32 from the "run" box. You should also be able to tell from TaskManager.

3189, so I didn't get much worth from that last 1GB but then again it can never hurt (and I got it cheaper aswell, bargained with the guy hehe).

Anyway, I always saw 50% usage of my CPU as a good thing, I thought "well it's a beast, appearantly that's all it needs to use for this" rather than going "oh it might not be using all of its potential power", so when you were talking about affinity I thought "well clearly it isn't the CPU", then shazam! and it hit me to think the other way.
All said and done I checked the cores through Task Manager (never looked at the cores individually there before, was obsessed with the usage percentage) and voilá; it only used two cores to 100%, thus 50% of its full potential.
Now, I've set the CPU affinity through KeyClone so obviously it doesn't work properly with that software, so I did it manually through Task Manager and now it uses all 4 cores to 100%, thus 100% usage.
Result? 50fps smooth as silk, with few drops here and there.
But I was able to go into orgrimmar now with all my slaves and the picture didn't freeze once, before I had to stop every 10metres or so because the image froze and if I continue to walk I'd lose my slaves.
Now I have 20-30 fps in crowded area such as outside the bank in orgrimmar. It still takes quite a while for all the players to render (I see only shadows for a while) but at least I can run through now without problems.

So my plan now, after I've grabbed myself some mexican food, is to play around with the slaves graphics etc, and my own, to see if it at all affects the fps (they stutter while walking sometimes, especially in town, I don't lose them but could look prettier :P) and tweak a bit.
To answer your questions or ideas anyway; I had already set CPU affinity through KeyClone but appearantly it doesn't work, I have set maxfpsbk to 10 for all my slaves since before, no window is above another one (the slaves are minimized windows), and as for Vista I have the second highest settings, I don't need the fancy see-through windows etc but I want the Vista interface as I hated XPs look and hate the older ones even more.


So two last questions then I guess;
I still have 200 ms though it seems, so I dunno what that's all about, I still think 150+ ms is too much to be concidered a 'normal' raise from three more clients. Any ideas?
And is there any way to set the CPU affinity for my WoW instances without doing it through Task Manager each time I want to play? Cause it appearantly doesn't remember the settings and KeyClone doesn't work for the job.

[Freddie]

...so when you were talking about affinity I thought "well clearly it isn't the CPU", then shazam! and it hit me to think the other way.

Woot! I'm glad I kept mentioning it. Now you can see why the first thing I said, way at the top, was that 50% CPU use is consistent with WoW's default setting (it apparently sets itself) to restrict itself to two cores. For practical purposes, because of WoW's default settings, your quad core was turning into a dual core.

One good thing is, we learned that three WoWs can run full speed on two cores, so I guess the full chip is good for six.

Result? 50fps smooth as silk, with few drops here and there.

Excellent.

So my plan now, after I've grabbed myself some mexican food...

Sounds good, I'm gonna get some lunch too.

I still have 200 ms though it seems, so I dunno what that's all about, I still think 150+ ms is too much to be concidered a 'normal' raise from three more clients. Any ideas?

What is that number exactly? A ping time? How are you measuring it? If it's a WoW thing you might have to explain because I don't play WoW although I have an account.

And is there any way to set the CPU affinity for my WoW instances without doing it through Task Manager each time I want to play? Cause it appearantly doesn't remember the settings and KeyClone doesn't work for the job.

There might be a setting for it in WoW's config file. I'll look later. In the meantime there are lots of free programs that will set the affinity each time you launch WoW including my own, HotkeyNet. If you do it with HotkeyNet, you make a hotkey like the following. I'll use F1 in the example but HKN can make use of a bazillion key combo's:

<Hotkey F1>
<TargetWindow wow1>
<SetAffinity all>
<TargetWindow wow2>
<SetAffinity all>
etc.

[Freddie]

P.S. Here some info about setting affinity with HotkeyNet.

SetAffinity

[chazz]

Woot! I'm glad I kept mentioning it. Now you can see why the first thing I said, way at the top, was that 50% CPU use is consistent with WoW's default setting (it apparently sets itself) to restrict itself to two cores. For practical purposes, because of WoW's default settings, your quad core was turning into a dual core.

One good thing is, we learned that three WoWs can run full speed on two cores, so I guess the full chip is good for six.

So am I!
And yeah I guess in terms of CPU a Q6600 can handle that many.

What is that number exactly? A ping time? How are you measuring it? If it's a WoW thing you might have to explain because I don't play WoW although I have an account.

Yes, it's ping.
I'm using an AddOn for WoW to display my ping.
When playing solo (one instance of WoW) I'm getting 40-60 ping, but when firing up all four I get 200+ most of the time, now obviously running more instances of wow puts more strain on the bandwith, but I have a 24mbit line and have been hosting LANs for friends before where we played other games and where I would usually have say 5-10 ping we all had 10-15, so a small increase, but here it's jumping up 150+ in ping which to me just seems a bit much.
Obviously WoW is an entirely different game and more complex I'm sure but yeah, I just thought it was a bit much and hoped for a solution when I would solve the fps problem, but the ping problem still remains.

There might be a setting for it in WoW's config file. I'll look later. In the meantime there are lots of free programs that will set the affinity each time you launch WoW including my own, HotkeyNet. If you do it with HotkeyNet, you make a hotkey like the following. I'll use F1 in the example but HKN can make use of a bazillion key combo's:

<Hotkey F1>
<TargetWindow wow1>
<SetAffinity all>
<TargetWindow wow2>
<SetAffinity all>
etc.

Thanks a bunch mate, using your software now, it's wonderful!

Took my time with the food and watched a few shows (conan & jay leno, funny stuff) so I'm going to head back to these 'issues' now and play around, see how much I can juice the graphic settings, where I can gain fps and why, and first on my list is seeing if using one core per instance is better than using all for all instances, now that I finally truly understand what you've been saying all along. :thumbsup:
Something I found interesting is how I noticed that 50fps was my limit and it doesn't stay capped at all times, even when out of cities, whereas a guy on the forums with basically same rig as I have supposedly runs it with 60 capped, maybe I should ask him a few questions and hope he's nice enough to respond.

[Freddie]

[Thanks a bunch mate, using your software now, it's wonderful!

Thanks a lot.

I'm using an AddOn for WoW to display my ping.
When playing solo (one instance of WoW) I'm getting 40-60 ping, but when firing up all four I get 200+ most of the time, now obviously running more instances of wow puts more strain on the bandwith, but I have a 24mbit line and have been hosting LANs for friends before where we played other games and where I would usually have say 5-10 ping we all had 10-15, so a small increase, but here it's jumping up 150+ in ping which to me just seems a bit much.

My guess is the Nagle algorithm is kicking in. Hopefully it's kicking in at your end and not Blizzard's server. With XP you can disable Nagle in the registry. I don't know how to do it with Vista but you can probably Google it.

Actually Nagle is my only guess. It fits the profile perfectly of suddenly bumping times from 50ish to 150ish, because it's whole purpose is to delay transmissions for up to 200 ms under certain circumstances.

I just googled a little bit and found this nice article:

http://thecowmoos.blogspot.com/2008/...raft-ping.html

And here's a thread about Nagle in WoW -- apparently Blizzard tried to disable it -- maybe they put it back in ?

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/th...73314912&sid=1

a guy on the forums with basically same rig as I have supposedly runs it with 60 capped, maybe I should ask him a few questions and hope he's nice enough to respond.

Sounds like a good idea.

[chazz]

Ah yeah, I've done that change in the registry already in hopes of improvement, can't really say if it improved a little bit or not, sometimes the ping has gone down to 120, but most of the time it's at around 200.

On another note for anyone interested, I did some testing now and came to the following conclusions;
- Running each instance on each core or running them all on all cores makes no difference, nor does it to divide them.
- My graphics options has NO IMPACT on my fps? By this I mean on my slaves.. I can run all four slaves now on highest settings, 1680x1050 resolution and cap fps off at 50 even while in the background and it makes no difference for my main instance.
The sad part about this is that I cannot seem to do anything to juice the fps on my main up to a steady 60, instead I have to settle for capping it off at 50 and still have it drop down tp 45ish sometimes and to 20-30 in orgrimmar (12 even at one brief point).
The good part about it in theory is that I can run all my slaves on the same options as my main which would make switching over to a slave much easier, especially considering PvP play later on, but I say in theory because I don't use Maximizer due to the fact that just playing in windowed mode alone makes me lose a ton of fps and always have (has nothing to do with several instances of wow in other words), don't know how I'll deal with this later when PvP becomes more of a reality.

Anyway I guess I should be happy for having 50 fps alot of the time and a much more smoother experience now, but it still bugs me alot that something is going nuts over running several instances of the game.

[Freddie]

Ah yeah, I've done that change in the registry already in hopes of improvement, can't really say if it improved a little bit or not, sometimes the ping has gone down to 120, but most of the time it's at around 200.

My guess is, we've got a replay of affinity here. I think probably Nagle isn't really turned off even though you took steps to turn it off. It just sounds too exactly like Nagle -- the sudden drastic drop to the 150ish range.

I don't use Maximizer due to the fact that just playing in windowed mode alone makes me lose a ton of fps and always have (has nothing to do with several instances of wow in other words), don't know how I'll deal with this later when PvP becomes more of a reality

So how are your windows arranged now? One is full screen and the others...?