Crazy Event Spam?

[MuffinManKen]

I reported this to Blizzard but was wondering if others have been noticing this:

I've been researching some performance issues that I and other people have been having lately. Running /etrace has given some crazy results: Friend's destruction Warlock: Block of 12 ACTION_SLOT_CHANGED events every 5 seconds. This is just while idling in the Garrison. Causes horrible hitches in framerate. My destruction Warlock: No event spam at all. Wife's hunter: Had a crazy series of SHIPMENT_UPDATE events every 0.02 seconds. Went on for quite a while, then suddenly stopped. My Frost Mage: 7x BAG_UPDATE_COOLDOWN ACTIONBAR_UPDATE_COOLDOWN SPELL_UPDATE_COOLDOWN This was every few seconds. Again, just idling in the Garrison. Ported to Dalaran, Spam disappeared. Ported to Stormshield, and the 7 BAG events dropped to 1 but the block kept repeating. Went back to Garrison and it started again. I removed all my gear and put everything in the bank, still got a constant stream of BAG update events. Clearly something is going wrong here.

[semlar]

The event spam should not be causing any sort of frame-rate issues unless you have an addon doing something resource-intensive in response to it.

12 ACTIONBAR_SLOT_CHANGED events is nothing, so if that's locking up his interface there's more going on.

[Phanx]

Yep, an event firing doesn't actually do anything or consume any system resources. That only happens if some addon (or some part of the default UI) is listening for that particular event, and runs some code in response to it. Like Semlar said, if you're seeing framerate drops when an event like ACTION_SLOT_CHANGED fires, one of your addons is doing something very wrong. All the events you listed are just very frequently-firing events that don't really mean anything most of the time; most addons should not even be listening for them, and if they are, they should be doing only minimal processing in response to them.

You can install a CPU monitoring addon to see which addons are actually consuming excessive CPU time, or if you can reliably reproduce the FPS degradation, use a binary search pattern to quickly narrow down which addons are causing or contributing to the problem.

Once you've identified problem addons, update them if possible, or just disable them if there are no updates; if they've been updated recently (eg. since WoD release) post a comment or bug ticket to let the author know about the problem, since someone with a more powerful computer will be able to handle addons consuming more CPU time without noticably affecting FPS, or there may be other factors (for example, if the problem only exists when both Addon X and Addon Z are enabled, but not when only one or the other is enabled).

[MuffinManKen]

I understand that the events on their own are not causing significant performance hits, the point of the post was that I'm noticing that WoW is kicking out some weird event spam. Yes, obviously the performance hit is from addons that are listening to those events. But those events make no sense.

[Seerah]

Was this with all addons disabled?

[Phanx]

Originally Posted by MuffinManKen I'm noticing that WoW is kicking out some weird event spam. ... But those events make no sense.

The fact that those events fire all the time for no apparent reason is not new behavior, and it's not "weird" unless you define that word as "exactly how it has always worked" which is certainly not how I'd define it. There is probably some internal functionality that requires those events to fire so frequently, but it's not relevant to addons, so addons should mostly just be ignoring them, so -- again -- if you're experiencing problems and you think those events are related, you have some addon(s) that are doing something wrong. There's nothing wrong/weird/new/buggy about the behavior of the events themselves.