Low fps / paging

[riboui]

Most of the time fps is pegged at 60, but in some zone areas fps drops to essentially zero. It's consistently reproducible, for example when at the base of the Zul'Farrak pyramid with 5 toons. It also happens a lot after a wipe when running back to instance with 5 ghosts. Resource monitor is showing that the system is furiously writing to the pagefile when this happens. There's plenty of free memory, so I'm not understanding why. I've tried disabling addons, lowering graphics settings, different configurations of IS (DX9, DX11, development patches). Same behavior.

Any ideas, or suggestions?

[lax]

It's probably just due to WoW times 5. I don't think it would be related to Inner Space, and probably wouldn't make a difference between the different IS and DirectX versions, as you've observed.

Lowering your graphics settings, including (most importantly?) view distance, should be the most effective way to handle this problem in the short term. Longer term, I know nothing about your hardware but if there's a lot of hard drive accesses going on and that seems to be the bottleneck, then a faster hard drive may significantly improve things. A lot of multiboxers are getting Solid State Drives (SSDs) for this reason. I suspect that you know the difference between memory and storage so you're not telling me you have plenty of free memory because you see the hard drive has plenty of space available, but if not, one reason for a lot of page file usage would be if you are actually running out of memory. That would definitely hurt performance a lot.

Are you on Windows Vista? Windows 7? You can disable Aero for a noticeable performance boost as well

[algor]

I am getting the same lag spikes (fps drop from 60 to 3) with Intel SSD as system/wow/page file drive with 8gig or ram under windows 7. Started happening "a lot" more as soon as I increased the view distance on slaves from minimum to medium. My memory usage is never over 80% so I was not realizing it was a page file issue since you do not hear SSD write =)
Back on minimum again.

Lax do you think that the size of page file might matter here?

[riboui]

I am getting the same lag spikes (fps drop from 60 to 3) with Intel SSD as system/wow/page file drive with 8gig or ram under windows 7.

My computer configuration is similar to Algor's.

I7 950
12G Ram
180G SSD
Nvidia 460

[lax]

The size of the page file is *probably* irrelevant, unless it's being resized a lot. Anything else I suggest at this point is pure speculation, I don't have any more ideas with actual substance. So you're both using SSDs, do you use 1 WoW folder or 5? (I would expect better performance from 1)

[algor]

Its 1 wow folder with 6 GB fixed size page file.

[riboui]

One Wow folder as well. This isn't so much a performance problem to be tuned. It feels much more like a livelock issue, where the Wow instances are competing for a resource lock. Could be related to the write mechanics being different on SSDs vs. HDDs.

[riboui]

Reverted to Windows Vista Ultimate 64 on a HDD. Otherwise hardware/software identical. Problems not present on this configuration.