Stuttering

[Spectro]

I installed a bunch of addons at once. I forgot that this is usually a bad idea because now it's hard to find which one is the troublemaker of the bunch. I'm running at a smooth 70 fps, yet there is a lot of what I would characterize as "stuttering".

Is there an easier way nowadays to figure out which addon is causing this problem than to enable addons one by one and see when the stuttering starts?

[ravagernl]

Sort by date if you forgot which AddOns you installed recently. That way, you can find the culprit

[Spectro]

I've actually tried that without any luck. It also doesn't help that the majority of my addons were recently installed at the same exact time.

Is it possible that the problem is not any one addon but rather too many addons?

[Cairenn]

Enable 1/2 of your addons. Log in. See if it's stuttering. If yes, it's in that 1/2. If not, enable the other half, see if it's stuttering. Once you know which 1/2, divide that group in 1/2. Rinse & repeat. Faster than one by one.

[voodoodad]

Originally Posted by Cairenn Enable 1/2 of your addons. Log in. See if it's stuttering. If yes, it's in that 1/2. If not, enable the other half, see if it's stuttering. Once you know which 1/2, divide that group in 1/2. Rinse & repeat. Faster than one by one.

What if... What if he has an odd number of addons? Which addon should he cut in half???

And then if he carries over the remainder and divides by pi...

These are the kind of things that keep me up at night...

[Cairenn]

*pokes vdd*

[xelepart]

Specto, it's entirely possible it's multiple addons interfering with each other.

As for an approach to determine it that isn't just enabling/disabling addons hoping to figure it out, there are a couple options:

Some mods list "known conflicting" mods on their descriptions, but that's not particularly common these days. But hey, if you're at work and can't actually log in for the next six hours, might as well browse the websites/descriptions/forums for every mod you installed and see if they list any problems!

There are mods that track cpu/memory usage, and display it. You could get one of those, and watch it and see which either uses the most, or which one spikes/increases a lot during the stuttering.

There's also simple logic, if you know much about how the wow interface works. For instance, I have found that bag mods are notorious for doing a whole lot of calculations on a pretty regular basis. If the stutter happens when you loot an item, but generally not if you're just jumping around in circles, it might be a bag mod. If it happens when you mouseover a mob, it might be a tooltip mod.

Obviously, these are just hints that might narrow in. It's always possible you installed a mod that some less-experienced coder wrote, who hooked the "ON_UPDATE" which runs at your FPS, and did tons of calculations on each one, but he never noticed 'cause he has a six thousand dollar desktop to play wow on, and neglected to think of those of us who are stuck playing it on a five hundred dollar laptop.

Another way to narrow in, often mods that have similar areas of focus conflict. If you have two tooltip mods, or two nameplate mods, even if it logically seems like they should work together, they probably both hook all the same things, and one might screw the other up.

Then, of course, there's the completely illogical ones. Carbonite's map has serious problems with Wintergrasp timers, and tooltip mods that are acceptably fast could have a huge impact on inventory-scanning mods (like bag mods), since a lot of mods scan hidden tooltips quite frequently, and if those tooltips are taking five times as much CPU to build due to tooltip mods, it might add up. Who knows.

Basically, without your list of mods, there's no way we can theorize anything specific. Even with it, we could only guess unless it's a well known issue. There's a couple tools, and some basic logic, but the only way to know for sure is to just power through.

-x

[Spectro]

The culprit seems to be TidyPlates and/or ChocolateBar (or some of the LDB addons rather). I'll try to narrow it down further. I may just do without these addons as they aren't really essential for me.

[jbashara]

I've dealt with this a lot throughout various new patches; I have almost 100 addons as well, so I know what you mean about it being tough to isolate the culprits. Other than what an earlier poster wrote above (which is really good advice), try using an addon like LoadIt or TooManyAddons to manage the disabling/enabling and reloading the UI.

I use LoadIt and it works great. You can backup addon profiles which allows you to revert back to various "snapshots" of testing, and the UI is really simple; to disable an addon, just un-tick the box next to its name, and then you can hit the "ReloadUI" button for a quick reload to see if the problem persists.

Last night I used this method to find out that AuldLangSyne was slowing my client down to 15 frames per second, for some reason.