(Autenil) Running 2 clients on a dual-core machine

[Official Forums]

Kanazawa@Innovation wrote:

When I start 2 EQ2-Clients they both seem to be locked to one core of the cpu.
I wanted to get rid of my notebook on which I normally started the second client and my new computer should have got enough power to handle 2 clients simultanously.

Configuration:
Intel 8400 Core2 Duo CPU
4Gb RAM
Geforce 8800GTS 512
Windows XP SP2 with patches

I have already tried to manually assign core 0 or 1 to the clients but it doesn't seem to work.
Every time I start 2 instances of the game and have one displayed on my main screen and the other on my second performance goes south (around 15-20 fps). Taskmanager shows only 50% CPU-load so it seems both clients are locked to one core.

Is there a solution for this problem?

The EQ2 client already assigns affinity for the main thread in an attempt to load balance for multiple clients running. If you have 4 cores and 4 clients running, each client's main thread should get its own core.

Affinity is set on a thread level, so you won't see it in the "set affinity..." dialog in the process manager.

The problem you're describing seems to stem from the fact that you're running a dual-head video card and the EQ2 client always tries to run on the primary device. When you move the client over to the secondary device, performance will decrease (probably because the client is sending all of it's DirectX communication to the primary device but is being displayed on the secondary device).

Unfortunately, at this time there's no way to change the device that the EQ2 uses. If you run both clients on the same monitor, performance should still be good.


LINK

[Illuminator]

Originally Posted by Official Forums

The EQ2 client already assigns affinity for the main thread in an attempt to load balance for multiple clients running. If you have 4 cores and 4 clients running, each client's main thread should get its own core.

Affinity is set on a thread level, so you won't see it in the "set affinity..." dialog in the process manager.

Ah! This explains the sporadic bug I've been having, where 2 clients run sluggish as hell only to see that they both set their affinity to the same core. And you go into Task Manager/Process Explorer to view the process affinity and it doesn't look wrong at first, but on a 2-core system when each client is running at 25% CPU it's pretty clear.