Suffering really bad performance

I've recently started running a 6 man team for Everquest 2 and for the first few weeks the performance was ok, however, over the last week or so the game has become almost unplayable.

I'm running the game on extreme settings (the lowest) and cannot zone from guild hall to anywhere without a few toons dropping to character select. Its the same for zoning into dungeons.

Performance in dungeons is very bad with some characters having very low frame rates and lagging badly.

Quite often CPU and memory are at 100%, I have tried various CPU set ups through ISBOXER (currently on a round robin set up) and have also changed the minimum processor state to be 100% but nothing seems to be improving performance.

I have 8MB of ram and Intel i5-4670K CPU @3.40GHz (there are 4 listed processors in device manager so I'm assuming hyperthreading is available).

Graphics card is an NVIDIA GTX 770

My ISBoxer set up is: http://privatepaste.com/b336dccec7

I'm very new to all this and I'm sure I've made some funademental errors on set up so any help would be much appreciated. Let me know if you need any other info.

Thanks

[lax]

Intel i5-4670K CPU @3.40GHz (there are 4 listed processors in device manager so I'm assuming hyperthreading is available).

Your CPU is quad-core, non-hyperthreaded.

http://ark.intel.com/products/75048/Intel-Core-i5-4670K-Processor-6M-Cache-up-to-3_80-GHz
Hyper-Threading: no.

Part of the problem you're having is your CPU strategy. You've got cores 1 and 2 both assigned to one game instance, and the remaining 2 cores assigned to the other 5 game instances. This will give decent performance on the main instance, but probably will not fully utilize those two CPUs. My recommendation for this is to go to the Wizards menu, select CPU Strategy Wizard, and give it "all instances use all CPU cores". Don't enable the Hyper-threading setting in the wizard; it is auto-detected and should not be on for your CPU, especially not with a round-robin strategy.

If your RAM usage is hitting 100%, then this is going to significantly hurt performance. When it runs out, any time the game has to load anything into RAM (like to show you another NPC or character in the game) it's going to have to do a bunch of writing to your hard drive (or SSD) in addition to the RAM, which is orders of magnitude slower. You should consider lowering the in-game video quality settings to bring your RAM usage down (EQ2 has a drop-down or something that you can set to High Performance, right?), or add enough RAM to not run out. You can also try running fewer characters temporarily, to see if that results in a significant change in performance.

Finally, if you haven't visited http://isboxer.com/wiki/HOWTO:Tweak_your_framerate this has a bunch of information that can help you with this specific issue. The "Identifying framerate bottlenecks" section is particularly useful if you aren't sure what you're being limited by, but knowing your CPU and RAM usage is a very good start. The tool linked in that section will also monitor your GPU and Video RAM usage as well.

Many thanks for the reply, changing the CPU usage to what you suggested has helped performance massively. I haven't dropped out of game whilst zoning whilst using the new set up.

I'm also going to enquire about getting another 8GB of RAM just to pep the system up a bit.

Thanks again

Also, I can't 6 box if I have ZoneAlarm active. I have to kill it. It doesn't seem to affect me in any other game but EQ2. And I can 4box with it just fine, but as soon as I do all 6 I can't even play until it's disabled.

Not sure if that affects anyone else, but just posting FWIW.