Keep the World of Warcraft install size very low by streaming (+throttling)
Posted: Sun Jul 01, 2018 6:42 pm
So a fresh install of wow becomes playable after just 1 GB of predownload... But if you let it finish downloading everything you'd end up with a 40-80 GB monster folder. That's not good on an SSD. Especially not if you also add the 15 GB worth of prepatch files that come in at 100 kb/s usually if you accidentally leave the launcher open. (Can be turned off.)
So the trick is to reinstall WoW thus resetting its size to zero, and then click the Play button as soon as it becomes available, usually around 700 MB later. Congratulations, your WoW install size is under 1 GB instead of around 50 GB. For now... (It will still reach over 40 GB in the background, over time, as you play. We should prevent that... Or at least put it off, for later.)
The next trick therefore, is to slow down the background downloading to just fast enough for the game to download your immediate surroundings and enable gameplay. But not so fast that it will complete every zone and every item model in an afternoon. It will trickle in slowly, but the download process won't finish. At least not for a very long time.
If the folder is starting to get too big again, simply go and have yourself a nice little do over; Reinstall, throttle network, and enjoy tiny folder sizes for a while longer.
Until a long enough play session lets the battle.net agent trickle-download the whole game again. Then it is time to reinstall yet again. Over and over :)
p.s.: If your drive ever fills up (0 bytes left) WoW will crash. So don't let it get there. I tried installing onto a 4GB RAMdisk, but it filled up in under six hours. (Backed by a fake 40GB pagefile as the installer checks free space left before it lets you begin the setup process. But once it starts installing, it stops checking.)
So the trick is to reinstall WoW thus resetting its size to zero, and then click the Play button as soon as it becomes available, usually around 700 MB later. Congratulations, your WoW install size is under 1 GB instead of around 50 GB. For now... (It will still reach over 40 GB in the background, over time, as you play. We should prevent that... Or at least put it off, for later.)
The next trick therefore, is to slow down the background downloading to just fast enough for the game to download your immediate surroundings and enable gameplay. But not so fast that it will complete every zone and every item model in an afternoon. It will trickle in slowly, but the download process won't finish. At least not for a very long time.
If the folder is starting to get too big again, simply go and have yourself a nice little do over; Reinstall, throttle network, and enjoy tiny folder sizes for a while longer.
Until a long enough play session lets the battle.net agent trickle-download the whole game again. Then it is time to reinstall yet again. Over and over :)
p.s.: If your drive ever fills up (0 bytes left) WoW will crash. So don't let it get there. I tried installing onto a 4GB RAMdisk, but it filled up in under six hours. (Backed by a fake 40GB pagefile as the installer checks free space left before it lets you begin the setup process. But once it starts installing, it stops checking.)