Random lag spikes -> high SSD drive % utilisation spike

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1

Hey all,

Started getting random lag spikes in the past 2-3 days. Certain actions like using an ability, or jumping occasionally trigger or just randomly every 20-40 secconds. Opening certain menus (Map particularly) and occasionally loading screens take longer too. FPS doesn’t seem to get affected when spikes occur. It literally feels like the game skips a beat and then catches up.

Whenever any of these occur, in task manager performance tab, I see a large spike in % utilisation on the disk drive (from 0-1% to 60-100%). memory and processor don’t seem out of the ordinary.

My drive is a Crucial SSD 240gb. I installed it about a month and a half ago and it only has OS, WoW and discord along with some browsers. It’s about 40-50% full.

What I have tried to fix so far:

  1. Remove all addons ( literally removed them from addons folder, not just disable)
  2. Clear cache, wtf and interface folders
  3. Remove RAM sticks and place in different slots from 3x4gb to 12gb to 1x4gb.
  4. Reduce graphics quality to 1 (made no difference, not much difference to FPS either)
  5. Check SSD health using Crucial’s Storage executive (everything appears fine and “healthy”
  6. Check SSD health using some cmd scripts I saw online ( no issues found)
  7. Check temperatures of processor and graphics card are within limits
  8. Uninstall and Reinstall the game (60gb download for nothing!)
  9. Attempt to update drivers. Couldn’t find any new drivers using automatic search or driver search apps
  10. Fully disable anti virus software

My pc is very old but until now, I’ve had no issues. Here’s the full spec
Intel i5 2500k Sandy Bridge processor
AMD Radeon 6950 2gb Graphics card
12gb DDR3 Ram (3x4gb) Though I used to run 2x4gb and there was no big difference in FPS and at both configurations I didn’t use to have lag spikes
240gb Crucial SSD

Not sure what to try next tbh. Haven’t changed anything in my system from when these spikes started. Most of my hardware hasn’t had any driver updates released for a while but everything was fine until few days ago.

Reinstalling WoW did help with loading screen and opening of maps problem but it’s still not as what it was before I started getting these issues.

Any suggestions? Thanks in advance

2

Hm… with 40-50% full it should work as usual unless it has some problems handling compressed data.

What can you do:

  • Run latencymon, then run the game, when it lags alt-tab to it. If it’s all red then it’s likely a driver conflict (you can check details - to see which drivers it could be).
  • You can check temperatures - maybe for some reason the SSD is getting very hot? (or some other temp problems?)
  • Check system logs after it spikes (maybe some power or OS problems?)
  • You can use MS Process Explorer to monitor which resources wow.exe uses and say GlassWire to have an overall network monitoring - maybe WoW is trying to download something? If it would hit CASC files then I/O would be high and then CPU when compressing/decompressing.
3

Which model of SSD you have? Many manufacturers (including Crucial) have cheaper models which have no RAM of their own so in some situations they can be very slow, though even that shouldn’t cause issues like you describe. In case of Crucial BX500 is the cheaper version while MX500 is “normal” version.

How are temperatures? While unlikely, SSDs can throttle if they get too hot which can happen especially if the ambient temperature is higher now that the summer has arrived.

4

If fps isnt being effected its most likely a connection issue.