Issues with defragging my HD...

[Missing_Minds]

The main performance increase from a defrag will be in loading times when zoning -- while the game is moving new maps and textures into RAM. If you're also a bit short on memory, then paging to and from disk and RAM will also be a bit faster, but still a rough performance hit, and it's one that affects gameplay more than loading.

One way to think of it is to take something like jelly beans or gumballs. Mix them all up and put them on the floor so you can look at it flatly.

Lets say the red ones are your DDO files. When the game wants something, it has to hen peck each red one out. That takes a while doesn't it. The DDO files are fragmented.

Now, lets say you actually had all of the red colored stuff together in a nice grouping. When you need to pull up something for DDO again, you have everything right there and you can find it much faster.

This is where your performance gain will come from. Some textures, sounds, and such are loaded while questing. The fragmented files slow this down pretty good.

[knightgf]

I downloaded a special defrag program called "Defraggler" which allows you to defrag individual files. While it doesn't completely defrag the DDO files I have, it is greatly reduced, and at most, theres about 99 fragmented files on my client_highres.dat file. To be honest, I'm not sure if I notice much of a gain in performance in-game; I think, however, things tend to be more smooth. The game doesn't feel as choppy as before when I play it. Its a bit odd to describe it, but thats what I am experiencing.

NTFS is an obsolete filesystem and we all have to deal with it until MS finally develops or adopts a modern FS.

Heh. NTFS has existed as a FS since 1993. Granted, its gone through many revisions, but I find it pretty amazing that today, we're using a FS thats about 17+ years old.

[PopeJual]

The rumor is pure BS, btw.

The "rumor" that he's referring to is not reasonable. DDO is not going to "cause" memory leaks in the other programs in your computer, but it's pretty likely that DDO does have a memory leak itself. The fact that performance starts out okay and then gets progressively worse as you switch back and forth between characers sounds pretty memory-leaky to me. It's entirely possible that there is a different cause for the performance degradation, but when I see hoofprints, I'm going to keep on thinking "horse" instead of "zebra".