Graphics Lag

[robthedude]

Every 20-30 seconds my framerate drops to about 6 for a few seconds, then back up again... rather irritating, and I can't play my priest because it messes up my healing good and proper...

so, what have I tried -

Defragging - I defragged and in the report it said that common.MPQ (a 3.75gig warcraft data file) was in 69 pieces and couldn't be defragged. so I copied it to another comp, deleted the one on my computer and defragged, then copied it back, that sorted out the fragmentation problem but not the graphics lag :s I checked the fragmentation again and a different warcraft file was in 69 pieces!

Power Management - I've turned off all power management settings on my computer, all of them... going for full thinking juice, that didn't fix it (although the framerate went up by 5 when it wasn't playing silly buggers)

Memory - 1gig of RAM and static pagefile size, as it always has been so I'm guessing it's not that

I'm running a rubbish HP Pavillion dv5000, nasty 128mb shared memory graphics card, 1 gig of ram, 1.8mhz 64bit processor
30 frames per second is perfectly playable, I know people with better computers that get less

So, lets please hold the 'get a better computer' replies until later, anyone got any adivce? or having the same problem?

[Layrajha]

You might wonna try a good defrag prog? I don't know any, actually, but there are some for sure that won't leave you with huge files fragmented.

Else, is it the same when you run wow with no addon?

[robthedude]

Yeah, should have mentioned that

I've got lots of addons running (somewhere in the region of 200) and turning them all off makes absolutely no difference at all, not even 1fps more or less. And I still have the spike problem...

I'll try another defrag program

[Xanithon]

Yarrr. I get this too... But Its less important since im just worried about my DoTs ticking.

[Layrajha]

Oh, when you open your task manager, do you have a messy huge list of processes? Can you identify the ones that you are the "owner" of?

[Gemini_II]

Layrajha can deal with the "process" monster

I'm going to hope that the OP is running PerformanceFu? If so, enable the CPU Profiling and play for awhile (and expand your list to top 10 or 20). See if anything big shows up there (KTM used to be huge here, while low in memory).

As for a windows Defrag tool: Diskeeper is the best. They made the Defragmenter that comes with Windows 2000/XP(and prob Vista). Once you install this, you never have to defrag again; it's all automagically done afterwards.

[robthedude]

Right, Diskeeper downloading looks good

Larajha - Yup, lots of stuff in processes, any ideas which are dodgy? got a website maybe?

yeah, got PerformanceFu, and it's helped me to weed out some of the more heavy addons
but disabling all my addons doesn't solve the problem

I'll get this Diskeeper thingy and let you know if it helps cheers for all the replies

[Siz]

I know you don't want to hear this, but it is amazing what a huge difference upgrading hardware can make. Something as simple as increasing memory can completely change your gameplay, 1gb is reasonable though. Something more serious such as adding a dedicated graphics card would either dramatically increase your framerate or it would allow you to increase the resolution or graphics quality.

Some types of lag cannot be fixed with anything other than a hardware improvement. Lag every 20-30 seconds seems to be too often to be caused by garbage collection, so I would guess that it is caused by memory filling up and paging to disk.

[Gemini_II]

It's definitely computer issue then. Some things off the top of my head:
It would be safe to set your pagefile to 1536MB min and 3072MB max.
Your hard drives need to have at least 20% free space at all times to perform properly.
Exactly what video card do you have? That makes a big difference... AGP slot in your PC?

Siz is right though. Small upgrades (faster HD, better video card) can make big differences. I also don't have alot of money to spend so I know the economic approach.

[Tumes]

Originally Posted by Gemini_II It would be safe to set your pagefile to 1536MB min and 3072MB max.

If you're fighting fragmentation and slow disk I/O you'll probably want to set your pagefile to a single size (e.g., min 3072MB, max 3072MB). Setting a lower min size means that the pagefile can grow. On a highly utilized disk, that means you'll end up fragmenting the pagefile, too - which in turn slows down performance. By forcing a single size pagefile, the entire amount of diskspace is reserved for the pagefile and you avoid pagefile fragmentation.

Take a look at your memory utilization. If you're sitting at or above 80%, you'll probably be best served by adding more RAM.

If you have a fragmented pagefile but don't have Diskeeper, check out contig.exe from sysinternals.com. It's a free utility that will defrag your pagefile for you (reboot required).