The Spirit Realm

I haven't done any serious 2-boxing in a few years, but I have a rezbot and a small army of dust-gathering alts on a second account.

After coming back to EQ 2 months ago, I noticed that each instance of EQ takes up much more memory than it did just 12-18 months ago. I have 2 Gb of RAM, but EQWin2 gives me a "low memory" warning and I notice a slowdown if one of the toons is running through a graphically intensive zone in SoF or TSS. When I check Windows' task manager, it reports that each EQ instance is using 600-800 Mb of RAM, which is a lot considering that I have all the bells, whistles and Luclin models turned off except for the ones needed for mounts. 1-2 years ago I could two-box just fine on a PC with just 1Gb of RAM, so the significant increase in memory use is puzzling. Load times are also significantly longer when I have both accounts running. Granted, I don't trust Windows' task manager because it doesn't always report actual physical memory use, but the slowdowns and the EQWin2 "low memory" messages appear to match what it shows.

Is there a way to limit EQ's memory use to, say, 500Mb per instance? Should I experiment with PlayNice, another LavishSoft product that I haven't tried yet? The current situation makes it harder to leave an alt in the guild hall to preserve guild portal settings and if I decided to start 2-boxing seriously again, I might have trouble in newer/higher level zones.

You can do things to reduce its memory use, but I don't know if you'll be able to get it down to 500 MB or not. Things to do that will reduce memory use include turning off all luclin models (can save 300MB per instance, supposedly), turning off velious armor models and choosing low texture quality. I've found its hard to get memory use below 650MB per session.

Use wineq2 if you don't, it does help. There is a guide to eq memory usage on this page, at the bottom. http://www.lavishsoft.com/wineq2/faq.php
I don't know how accurate it is.

I've found an easier solution is to upgrade memory if you can. I want to run 3 or 4 at a time on my laptop, but it only has 2GB of memory. I just recently decided to upgrade to 4GB, even though windows xp only sees 3.5 GB.

Edit: Totally didn't read that you use wineq2 . Yeah, use eqplaynice. It helps too, I recommend setting foreground to 40 fps and background to 10.

Thanks, I'll tweak the settings mentioned in the FAQ and try PlayNice over the long weekend! Adding more memory is not a great option since I'd have to get rid of the currently installed 512Mb chips, then put 4 1Gb ones in and I don't want to spend a non-trivial amount of money on a 5 year old system. For all I know, it may run just fine for another 2-3 years or it may give up the ghost next month...

I'm not an in depth boxer, but I regulary use both accounts at the same time, on either my laptop or desktop and have never used any 3rd party program. Never have issues running both instances on the same machine, except maybe in some of the newer zones on the laptop (Lagging Plains anyone?), and it works great, low zone times etc. I run both machines normally even when boxxing at full graphics settings.

I think some relevant information would be your system hardware specs, and what OS (XP/Vista / 2k / Millenium / etc).

Myself both my machines are dual core AMDs, the laptop having only 2gb of RAM (128mb devoted to video card), while the desktop runs 4gb RAM and 1gb Dedicated BFG NVidia card. Laptop is still running XP, while the desktop is Vista Basic. One thing of note, if using 32 bit XP, and using 4gb RAM (the top out) you need to edit startup file options manually (add a space and the entry should be "/3gb") in order to use more than 3gb (built in RAM cap for XP).

As I said earlier, I'm not a super proficent user when it comes to boxxing, but have read a few places on the web, that a 3rd party program has become obsolete in most cases, except for optimizing screen usage between the two instances, or doing more than 2 instances at a time.

Hope that helps,
Crom

No Id go as far as to say with the new Frame rate limiter they built into EQ itself that WinEQ2 and EQplaynice are probably no longer needed, and so you could probably lose the 3rd program running and have it use less memory(3rd program being WinEQ2). I know plenty of ppl that just run 2 instances of EQ without the use of WinEQ2 etc, on desktops and laptops without any real issues.

The major benefit from using WinEQ for me is the custom setting for each instanced. Sound on/off specifically is a major one for me. I 2 box a lot and 3 box often. With WinEQ I can set defaults so that sound is only on for one account and off for the other one or two. When i was running multiple instances of EQ without WinEQ I didnt have multiple copies of Everquest installed on on my hard drive so would have to go into settings and custom enable or disable sound every time I loaded the game for each account. :/

I run 2 instances of EQ from different program directories.

This helped me with the sound issues, although it does use more disk space.

I run one EQ from station launcher, and the other from the everquest.exe.

I sometimes have "video lag" issues, specially in bazaar, but I've heard other non-boxing people have had lag issues too there.

I don't think the 3rd party software is necessary.

And it got a lot better once I turned off the luclin models (except for horses)