World of Warcraft on Linux, performance improvements

2013-06-02
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World of Warcraft > (on Linux) >

Linux-specific notes on World of Warcraft performance improvements.

Table of Contents [hide]

Memory usage ∞

Only WoW should be running, and not other random crap. Check all of your startup programs. TODO – is this something that’s doable in Wine?

On Linux, it’s usually annoying to manage all of the startup programs. A “clean” distribution is usually the best route to go, otherwise you need to get into some reasonably technical stuff which will vary from distribution to distribution. That I cannot help you with.

Swapping ∞

Linux will be smart and not use a swap file unless it predicts that it will begin running out of memory sometime soon. It will flush data out from memory to the swap file when it believes that memory won’t be needed often, if ever.

If you’re ever concerned about your swap file being used, then it’s perfectly reasonable for you to do a:

\su
swap=`\swapon -s | \grep /|\cut -d " " -f 1`
\swapoff $swap
\swapon  $swap

Ubuntu-types may have to do:

swap=`\swapon -s | \grep /|\cut -d " " -f 1`
\sudo \swapoff $swap
\sudo \swapon  $swap

This will disable and then enable your swap file, forcing everything back into memory. If you really really want to, you can choose to not swapon and just keep it disabled. Be aware that your system or programs will hang/crash or whatnot if programs run out of memory.

Graphics driver ∞

If you demand open source drivers, then you must be prepared to have poorer performance than when using proprietary drivers. Sorry, that’s just the way it is.

I hope things have changed since this was written.

Driver settings ∞

I don’t know of any settings on Linux, however turning Linux desktop effects and such off might help. I’m not sure.

Earlier notes below: ∞

  • Your Linux distribution.

    • fancy desktop stuff
    • other resident programs, especially crap like slocate, cron jobs, backups and logging.
  • Building Wine from source, and using patches.

  • Wine configuration:

    • The basics from winecfg
    • Additional settings in regedit

  • Partition type (I’m told that NTFS is responsible for poor load times).

2011-06-25 – My latest success ∞

Linux distribution: Ubuntu (regular, not Lubuntu or anything), updated as of 2011-06-25.

Bug 19006: World of Warcraft: takes 2 minutes to log out

I’m using Wine ver. 1.1.30 and can comfirm that this solution works. I was
playing WoW off of my NTFS partition and had this problem. I copied my WoW
folder over to my Wine directory on my ext4 partition and not only did it solve
this problem, but it also improved load times as well.

Troubleshooting ∞

TODO

  • Viewport bug – known and not fixed, considered an addon issue

  • Different windowed modes, alt-tabbing issues, maximized program issues, locked keyboard/mouse

    • ctrl-alt-f1 then alt-f7 to return.
  • windowed mode notes
  • SysRq-reisub in emergencies
  • Killing the Wow task
  • task priorities, usefulness?

  • scheduling?

[SOLVED] Faded mouse cursor ∞

Reproduction:

World of Warcraft > Options > Advanced > [X] Hardware Cursor

  • The mouse is a faded / brownish colour.

Solution:

World of Warcraft > Options > Advanced > [_] Hardware Cursor

  • The mouse is seen

    • [SOLVED] The mouse is jerky when moved
    • See below for the solution.

  • [SOLVED] The X Windows mouse appears overtop of the WoW pointer.

[SOLVED] Regular mouse overtop of the WoW mouse ∞

Reproduction:

World of Warcraft > Options > Advanced > [_] Hardware Cursor

Solution:

Removing the X Windows mouse

[SOLVED] Jerky mouse cursor ∞

Reproduction:

World of Warcraft > Options > Advanced > [_] Hardware Cursor
World of Warcraft > Options > Advanced > [_] Triple Buffering

and max frame rate..

  • The mouse has jerky movement.

The solution may lie in Wine and not WoW.

Evidence I’ve seen is that the problem is that WoW does not actually have the hardware cursor functionality created for OpenGL. I’m not running with -opengl or the like though, so I’m not sure what’s going on.

Solution:

World of Warcraft > Options > Advanced > [X] Triple Buffering

remove the frame rate cap

[UNSOLVED] Screen freeze ∞

I’ve had situations where my screen would completely freeze.

I could not reliably reproduce this, but it has happened in two circumstances.

  1. On first startup. My system would freeze before WoW even appears. My mouse becomes the WoW mouse.

  2. When opening my quest objectives.

    • This could be the LightHeaded addon. I’m testing without it.

While frozen like this, I’ve confirmed that the system keeps running normally. I’ve had vent up and running and working to listen/talk in.

There could be a way to blindly reset the graphics card, but I can’t remember the trick and I don’t think I wrote it down anywhere.

I developed a timer so my wow script knows when WoW is unresponsive and kills it, but this does not matter. The issue lies with the video staying frozen, not the application continuing to run.

The keyboard also freezes with the video, but it becomes re-accessible with alt-SysRQ + r.

SysRq-reisub will do a more-or-less clean reboot.

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