Loading A Realm In World Of Warcraft: Cataclysm
| Overall Statistics | World of Warcraft: Cataclysm: Realm Loading |
|---|---|
| Elapsed Time | 00:18 |
| Read Operations | 5 727 |
| Write Operations | 124 |
| Data Read | 127.58 MB |
| Data Written | 1.18 MB |
| Disk Busy Time | 0.93 s |
| Average Data Rate | 138.15 MB/ |
Blizzard purposely designed World of Warcraft to have a more modular file system. Updates from Blizzard are distributed as MPQ archives, which are decompressed and extracted to their proper locations. This works well because adding a few files can easily expand the WoW universe.
However, this translates into storing a lot of individual files of varying sizes, which makes for a random I/O workload involving mixed transfer sizes. That’s what we see here when we load to Crushblow.
Random performance on a hard drive is still terrible, which is why WoW gamers are going to experience a bigger speed-up loading a level than Crysis 2 players as they ditch their disks in favor of SSDs.
I/O Trends:
- 88% of all operations occur at a queue depth of one
- 62% of all operations are random
