Performance Drop in Specific Periods of Certain 25-Man Encounters

[Zetapuppy]

I'd like to consider myself technically savvy, but this is something I've been combating with for a while, and I'm painting the wall red with blood from all the times I've beaten my head against it. The problem is that my frame rate drops considerably (from about 80 FPS to 40 or below) only during specific portions of specific encounters, typically when the whole raid is stacked on one point. This has an extremely noticeable effect on my input latency and feels harmful to my raid performance.The problematic encounters and times are as follows:

• Heroic Halfus, only at the start when all drakes are active and in close proximity.
• Cho'gall, in his final phase.
• Al'Akir, in P2 when everyone is at his front.
• Heroic Chimaeron, raid stacked during Feud.
• Heroic Valiona and Theralion, when the raid stacks for Blackout and huddles behind Val's breaths.

This performance hit happens regardless of graphics settings, and I know that the NVIDIA Control Panel is not toggling any unnecessary effects. Although I do run a large number of add-ons (which I can list if needed,) I watch my memory/cycle consumption closely, but I'd assume that if this were a memory leak issue it would affect my system under all conditions, not just the above. My system is as follows:

i7 860 at 3.9 GHz, does not rise above 65C under continued 100% stress from Prime95.
4x 2 GB Kingston DDR3 modules at 746 MHz (1492 MHz effective)
ASUS Maximus III Formula
GTX 580 at 850/1750/1025 MHz (4100 MHz effective VRAM,) does not rise above 68C.
1.2KW Silverstone PSU
Samsung Spinpoint F1 750GB (OS/games/apps)
Samsung Spinpoint F4 2TB (FRAPS/backup)

I have tried disabling the combat log, disabling the highest-activity non-raiding-crucial add-ons, tried forcing different CPU affinity masks, ran with and without vertical synchronization/triple buffering, have observed this across multiple graphics drivers, have repaired World of Warcraft many times, clear the Cache folder on a regular (nearly daily) basis, am up-to-date with all current add-ons and Windows updates, and am 100% confident that this is not due to overheating hardware. Seems like everything but running with the default UI, but that isn't much of an option for me.

I'm beginning to go mad! Which is why I'm here, hoping somebody has some magical piece of advice or can point me towards a solution to remedy this to some appreciable degree. Even if there's some blue post I've yet to cross that explains why this might be happening, I would be so damn grateful. Not knowing the reason behind this is driving me insane.

[Culture]

Interface -> Addons -> Recount -> Pause

[Zetapuppy]

Interface -> Addons -> Recount -> Pause

Why would Recount only be causing problems when the raid is grouped together under the conditions I mentioned?

[Mammoth]

The FPS is caused because a large number of events are being triggered, especially by aoe heals. Most of your time is WoW is processing these events.

Disabling recount has the possibility of working since it is trying to log these events, but you'll still find the FPS dropping during these periods.

The best advice is to set graphics low in anticipation of these events. Especially the spell details.

[ispano]

It could also be everything happening at once is taxing the CPU core that those processes are currently using. Yes WoW can use about 3 cores, but it cannot spread things out or use more. It will run some things on one core and thats it, so if too much is happening at once, it can choke.
You could try running a CPU usage log in the background and see if that's the case.

[Deleted]

Because there's a lot of scenery at the moment like AoE heals (effloresence, Holy Word: Sanctuary, Healing Rain).

[vesseblah]

All specific phases you listed are ones where whole raid is taking damage really fast, instead of just few people. It's 99% certainly addon/combat logging problem. And yes, my framerate drops too in the places you mentioned, but still remains totally playable.

[Culture]

tell us when you've tried pausing recount