Unravel

I'm running WoW (as well as the OS) off a 64GB SLC SATA SSD; and the improvement is mostly noticeable on first login when all the character assets for random people in Dalaran have to be loaded from all over the MPQ. Upon subsequent loading (e.g. porting, hearthing, alt logging) the speed-up is not that great (with 4GB Ram).
Note however that this is my experience under Mac OS X, so YMMV with respect to caching behaviour.

 

Alunra

There are programs that allow you to utilize symbolic links now. So symbolic links are not a hurdle.

Link Shell Extension
Junction Link Magic

Does anyone know of a hard drive tool that will monitor/log access?

 

dr_AllCOM3

Tell us if you find one. I'm interested in a program like that, too.

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manks

FileMon will do what you want. Check out the rest of the utils there for more nifty stuff.

 

dr_AllCOM3

Process Monitor actually. It's nice, even got a file summary.
There are quite a lot of reads goif on from WoW. This is Dalaran:

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Alunra

Doc, is that screenshot after WOW had already been started? I don't see any addon file accesses. How long is this capture from?

I'll play with this tonight. I have a system with 16gb of RAM so I'll have a chance to test this whole RAMDrive setup soon. I'm shooting to get this working with 12gb, but a smaller version will be possible with 8gb but of course, more=more here.

I'll post what I find out tomorrow

 

dr_AllCOM3

It's one round in Dalaran. I didn't post the addon stuff, because they get loaded in the memory anyway.

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Rayyeter

Has anyone ran into an issue where their computer hardlocks while playing or loading? Pretty much every day when I'm about to load into wow (usually dalaran), the bar fills up and my computer just freezes. Nothing in event log, no bsod, just a hard lock. Sometimes I'll just be flying somewhere and it hard locks. There's a massive thread on the wow tech support forums of people who seem to be having the same problem. I've tried all the "fixes" suggested, and none have worked.

Seeing this topic made me wonder if superfetch could have anything to do with it at all. Usually I get home from work, start up the computer and start WoW. Could there be something with the way superfetch works that would cause this?

This doesn't occur in the few other games I've tried (HL2/TF2, Far Cry 2), So I'm otherwise at a loss for what to do. Short of reformatting, I've tried about all I can think of.

You must obey the Dance Commander!

 

slant

Sounds like a hardware issue to me. Modern operating systems should never hard lock from software. WoW isn't very graphics intensive, but it can be fairly CPU and memory intensive. Try running an hour of memtest86 and orthos, see if you come up with any errors. Also run hdtune and check for errors and verify that SMART status is green. Lastly, if you've overclocked your computer, try reversing the overclock.

 

Extenze

Yes. I'm using a 7800gt atm, and it's quite nice. Albeit not quite as much as it would on older cards, because you're probably already using cards built for gaming, with drivers made for gaming rather than ancient VIVO/Workstation cards that were made for utility.

Not quite sure if this has been mentioned or not, but you can pick up user optimized drivers at Guru3D I use it all the time, and it's the best overclocking site I know of. I've noticed with older games, the improved FPS by using their optimized texture rending on the older games like WoW (older, graphics-wise) can be rather significant. The ATI drivers are particularly good because ATI releases their source code (for porting to Linux, among other reasons) and even produced guides on how to modify the code and use gfx card instruction sets.

 

Alunra

OK, I got the RAMDrive working and the symbolic links set. WOW RUNS!

I'm currently only using a 500mb ramdrive and I only have Interfaces and WTF folders on it right now. I did notice my load times were better but basic gaming was the same; as expected. The only part of the game it did make a difference beside load times was the Auction House. I use Auctioneer and having that addon in the ramdrive made a difference.

Doing some research on the file access I did notice something weird. If you make a backup of a folder say addons, and call it "addons_backup" or whatever, wow.exe STILL reads that directory. When I saw that I moved my backup folders outside of the world of warcraft directory and that made another noticeable improvement.

For my short test I had 65,500reads & only 185writes (no AH) so basic game play does not use a lot of writes. The big reads came from world of warcraft\data & world of warcraft\cache. I'm going to move that cache dir into the ramdrive next and see what that does. I have to install 64bit OS to test a bigger ramdrive and try to get the .mpq files in there. Those are the big hit read files.

 

Illundai

I used to use 3DAnalyze, but it hooks itself to your WoW process so I chickened out in case Warden would think of it as suspicious software. I never found a good answer if my worries were just, so I stopped using it just in case. Anyone know whether it's safe to use or not?

 

dr_AllCOM3

Interface & WTF get loaded into the memory anyway, it makes no sense to put them on a RamDisk. WoW reads every file in it's directory on startup. WoW only writes when you quit or reload, including cache. Almost all of the reads are from the large .mpq files, those over 2gb in size.

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Alunra

Yes, but i was using those directories more for test, to see if wow.exe chocked on symbolic links or not; which it didn't. Now that I know I can make it work ill spend some money on additional ram, 12gb, to get those .mpq files on there.

 

Extenze

Fraps does the same thing, but you wouldn't think twice about using fraps, would you?

 

Lumb

I have exactly the same issue as you. It will only usually happen at max one or two times per day, seems completely random other than the fact that it's only whilst I'm playing WoW.

 

swills

I also had this exact same issue. My PC would just randomly hardlock, sometimes two or three times a day and only while playing WoW. In my system I have two SLI'd GeForce 9800s, with one of them outputting to two monitors. WoW can be on either screen depending on what else I am doing. In the last few days I started refer-a-friend levelling, and as soon as I had a copy of WoW on each monitor, the PC would hardlock within 60 seconds of opening the second copy every time.

Recently I tried turning off SLI entirely, and running one monitor from each 9800 instead. Since then, I have had no lock-ups at all, but admittedly it has only been two days so far.

The quote in post #110 in this thread:
sounded exactly like the problem I was experiencing. It sounds to me like there's something WoW does that makes these cards lockup like this.

 

Hellfury

What options you used on 3Danalize and was a noticeable deference?

 

Reebz

I had the exact same issue; which I'm happy to report is now fixed:

Vsynch: off
Window mode: on
Maximised Window: on
Disable resize: on

Please ensure the settings above do not conflict with your GPU settings (ie: forcing Vsynch ON).

I hope this helps guys, best of luck.

 

BeerBelly

What programs were you using to get the RAMDrive working? I'm looking to do something similar in the future when I get my 8Gbs of RAM

 

Alunra

I actually forget which one; at work now. But, it really doesn't matter which ramdrive program you are using as long as it supports ntfs5.0 or higher, symbolic links won't work on anything less. For my testing I used a trial version of a commercial project, so I'm going to be looking for a ramdrive that is free anyway.

I've started a thread on my guild forum for all of the tweaks i have tried along with the setup of the ramdrive in more detail. www.tcol.us :: View topic - System Tweaks and more

 

dr_AllCOM3

Dataram RAMDisk. Actually it doesn't support NTFS, but you can simply format the ramdisk and it works. I guess it would be the same for any other ramdisk.

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Gogusrl

I did some testing as well with a 256 mb ramdrive and moving there Interface/WTF/Cache but did not notice much of an improvement.
This is the software I used (works on Windows 7) :
Link Shell Extension
Tools and utilities for Windows

 

Alunra

Ya, those folders are small enough to get into a ramdrive if your system has low ram. Interfaces and WTF are cached after the first load so you would only see a small boost on first load. The cache directory is actually one of the top 5 read files by wow.exe so it is making a difference. If you can get a bigger ramdrive the files that will make a big difference are common.mpq, common2.mpq, lichking.mpq. There are probably one or 2 others but would depend on how much ram you could get.

I would also run you own files usage report to see what the top hitters are for your game play.

 

◊ Repeek

Anyone use Lowping.com? I'm curious if I'll see an improvement (I'm east coast on a west coast server averaging 200ms ping).