Problematic 'lag' addons

[Xs]

I'm looking for some ideas as to key problematic addons to look at, my guild is forever battling with old farts who don't have time to go through a whole UI messing with the addons one by one to see which ones cause lag.

Specifically talking about the clusterfuck lag that happens with start of fight cooldown spam, large amounts of AoE and all those kinds of high client data situations. The easiest fix so far has been try and target anything which deals with the combat log, but it would be nice to get some ideas regarding addons that do a better job of it or any other things people have discovered and would like to share.

To clarify as well, this isn't hardware lag, 90% of the problem cases are running Sandybridge 'upper band' i5's, 460 GTX, 8GB DDR3 1333 and 7200 RPM Seagate/WD's, or higher.

[Deleted]

Death Note and Weak Auras (options) has been the ones for me, im in a 25 guild, and on back on malkorok heroic progression i just had to take those addons and dump them in the trash bin

It seems TellMeWhen is much lighter than WeakAuras, atleast for the things I am tracking

Good luck, hope this was informational

[Stingray]

Biggest culprit is Recount. Anyone using it should switch to Skada if they care about combat event lag.

I've never heard of WeakAuras being a problem.

[Snaige]

I've read that addons that communicate to your guild members, like, for example, silver dragon - when someone in the guild or raid sees a rare mob, it displays a message on your screen, are using way too much memory. Many people forget to turn those off. Myself included :3

[delk]

Recount was causing huge problems for several of our raiders back in ToT. Switching to Skada completely fixed the problem.

[Stingray]

Also, not addon related, but combat log event related: if you're doing 25-man raiding and are on a slower internet connection (1 Mbit upload speed or less), you should turn OFF the "Optimize Network for Speed" checkbox in the Network section of WoW's system configuration.

[Deleted]

Moveanything sends your fps to hell if you move the wrong frame out of your screen area - even if it's just a pixel.

[ComputerNerd]

Death Note and Weak Auras (options) has been the ones for me, im in a 25 guild, and on back on malkorok heroic progression i just had to take those addons and dump them in the trash bin

It seems TellMeWhen is much lighter than WeakAuras, atleast for the things I am tracking

Good luck, hope this was informational

WeakAuras options are load on demand, only when you actually load the options to make adjustments.
A reload of the UI after you have made the changes you want will reduce the memory usage.
But then it looks like you are simply using the more visible, but flawed measure of memory usage as an indicator of well performing addons.

Memory usage is rarely a case of poor performance, with CPU usage being the most likely culprit.
The difficulty is that CPU usage is far harder to measure, not being something you can see readily.
Something like OptionHouse can display it, but it has to be enabled on-demand really since that task itself of polling the CPU is intensive and will impact on performance even more.

[darkwarrior42]

Most others already covered what I would say; I'll just repeat that I've never had an issue with Weak Auras (and I use weakauras for pretty much everything on my Monk).

[Stingray]

Memory usage is rarely a case of poor performance, with CPU usage being the most likely culprit.
The difficulty is that CPU usage is far harder to measure, not being something you can see readily.
Something like OptionHouse can display it, but it has to be enabled on-demand really since that task itself of polling the CPU is intensive and will impact on performance even more.

Right, memory usage means basically nothing. Lot of people are pretty misinformed on that.

Another addon to see addon CPU usage is: http://www.curse.com/addons/wow/addon-profiler
Hasn't been updated in ages, but still works fine. If you use it, be sure to "/console set scriptProfile 0" after you remove it, otherwise you'll suffer a performance penalty forever, since the addon doesn't turn it back off.

[Vetali]

Instead of guessing, get Addon Usage and figure out what is really going on.

[RoKPaNda]

Biggest culprit is Recount. Anyone using it should switch to Skada if they care about combat event lag.

I've never heard of WeakAuras being a problem.

Aside from two versions of recount earlier in the expansion, I haven't noticed a difference between recount and skada, but any mod like that is going to have some impact on performance under certain conditions.

[Stingray]

There's a huge difference. Use one of the addon profilers above and you'll see.

There have been some fights in the game (25-man) over the last couple years that have been literally unplayable with Recount running. Recount diehards usually just pause it during those fights. People who run Skada don't even notice.

[pnutbutter]

take some screenshots of your UI during raid combat and post them, we might be able to give better input on what lags you specifically. sometimes it depends on how you use the addon, not just what the addon is.

[Xs]

take some screenshots of your UI during raid combat and post them, we might be able to give better input on what lags you specifically. sometimes it depends on how you use the addon, not just what the addon is.

Its not specific cases, its more a general advice/sharing request for known problem mods. I personally don't have bad (enough) problems with my UI, but I'm trying to help out some of our guildies who are seeing the effect of it.

[pnutbutter]

Its not specific cases, its more a general advice/sharing request for known problem mods. I personally don't have bad (enough) problems with my UI, but I'm trying to help out some of our guildies who are seeing the effect of it.

ah, I see, I misunderstood how the old farts fit into the story

[Xs]

Thanks for the help guys, compiled this along with some other info into a guide to help my guildies, if anyone wants to take a quick look heres the raw text: http://pastebin.com/iqBz4KPu