Running Multiple eqlaunch.exe Zone files

[Riklin]

Apologies in advance... I'm certain I'm not going to use the proper terminology here, but hopefully you will get the gist of my question...

HallsHavoc appears to be running fine. I'm not having too many issues, but one nagging thing is bothering me and that has to do with "ghosting" of mobs in zones. I have recently spent a lot of time (DAYS actually) in South Karana figuring out how to get Quillmane to spawn. In doing that with a ranger, I would track down a mob only to have it suddenly be a long way off, or I'd attack it only to not be able to hit it, with a message indicating the mob is too far away...

My network connection is good and fast 11+mbps down, 50+mbps up. Server is on one computer, dedicated server. I play on a different computer (of course).

My server is a 5ghz AMD 8 core with 32gig ram, WIN7 pro OS loaded on an SSD and a 4TB 10RAID array that the database files(and temp/tmp/cache files) are on.

To try and alleviate this ghosting, I kind of did a bit of a leap in logic and decided to launch multiple zone handlers. I'm thinking that if I keep each zone handler to handle 20 zones, that this ghosting should not be an issue. I have 78 static zones right now. Right now I start 4 zone handlers.

<start.bat excerpt>
@echo off
c:
cd \EQ\EQEmuServer
shared_memory.exe
start world.exe
echo World has been started...
ping -n 10 127.0.0.1 > nul
start queryserv.exe
start ucs.exe
start eqlaunch.exe first
start eqlaunch.exe second
start eqlaunch.exe third
start eqlaunch.exe zone
exit
</start.bat excerpt>

My question is how many zone files can you start?

Is there a benefit to starting multiple versus one?

What is the maximum number of static zones you can have? (can you have say 250?)

Is there something else I should be doing to stop "ghosting"?


Thanks,
Rick (HallsHavoc)