What is slowing me down?

[memetootoo]

Hi I just started an alt and disabled all my mods, and to my surprise my fps was much much better than with my mods enabled. So I was wondering if someone could take a look at my mods and let me know what is slowing things down? Although I feel like I need every single one of these mods, I willing to let some of them go if it means an 5-10 fps increase. I'm usually at about 20 fps. Or even better if you know of a better mod than what I have please let me know.

Here is a list of my mods:

http://img157.imageshack.us/my.php?image=untitled2bu7.jpg

[Tunga]

Anything which keeps a big database can cause a performance hit on some machines Thing like WoWEcon and I think Auctioneer.

With that many mods you could try to replace some more with Ace compatible mods, this should help since it means you save resources throguh the useof libraries. Try swapping Titan for Fubar. You can get Ace mods from www.wowace.com/files .

Ultimately though, that's a lot of mods. It's not likely to be one or two mods causing it, but rather the combination of all of them having a small effect. What you need to decide is which one was "the straw that broke the donkey's back", so to speak :) .

How much system RAM do you have? You could try increasing the amount given to mods on the Addon screen from character selection. I think it defaults to 32MB or 48MB? Try doubling it to 64MB or 96MB and see if that helps. If you have less than 1GB RAM then this probably won't help.

[Narak]

Ok, the only thing that really sticks out is the Titan panel mod. You could try changing to Fubar as it seems to have equivalents to most of the plugins you have. Try turning Titan panel off with your main and see if it makes any difference first, as it might not be the culprit. The only other way is to keep turning each mod off and see which gives you the best increase. It is quite possible that it is the combination of all your mods at once, in which case try turning down the graphics settings slightly. I found turning off 'smooth mouse' gave me back about 10fps.

[memetootoo]

Thank you for the replies, will another take a look at fubar when everything is updated. Seems to mess up my UI when I use it atm.

[ewichern]

In general: I would *HIGHLY* recommend that you back all those mods up into another folder and start clean... Only install mods that you absolutely NEED. I'm running on a bit of an outdated machine myself, and keeping mod loading and resource usage low makes a dramatic difference in the game's performance, and my subsequent enjoyment of my playtime.

Specific advice:

1) Auctioneer/EnhTooltip/Informant/Stubby/Etc use significant resources, especially once you start building up a larger database of AH scans. My personal solution, and what I'd recommend to you, is to disable them for all of your characters except a dedicated bank alt who handles all of your auctioning needs. Have your characters mail items for sale to the bank alt, and have the bank alt store your cash and only send it to your mains when you need it for something specific. Buy gear a level or two ahead of time with the bank alt and mail it to your mains, having it waiting for them when they're high enough to use it.

2) BigWigs... I've never used BigWigs specifically, but I know CT_Bossmod (which I don't use anymore either) is quite heavy on resource usage and loads a lot of data into memory. You might skip this one unless you're a RL. Most of the boss mods have options that broadcast warnings to the raid, so not every individual needs them installed.

3) I don't use an actionbar mod anymore... do you "need" one? The default is more than suitable 99% of the time... anything else is just a cosmetic change.

4) CECB used to be the gold standard, but with enemy castingbars in the default UI now, perhaps you can live without it?

5) Damagemeters: meters tend to be a noticable performance hit because they're constantly watching and parsing your combat log. For people with faster machines this isn't necessarily a big deal, but I noticed better response and less lag without one installed... The game is also a lot more fun if you don't care about being #1.

6) eCastingBar... Not sure why you're using this AND CECB since eCastingBar has target and focus castingbars built into it, but eCastingBar is another mod I've recently ditched... the default works just fine.

7) EquipCompare: Try eqcompare (think that's the name). It's Ace.. bit more lightweight.

8) Flightmap: with automatic flight point hopping, do you really have any reason to run this?

9) KTM is a raid thing and it's very useful when learning encounters. It's entirely useless solo though. Load it manually when needed, either by logging out and back in, or get something like MCP (Master Control Program) to load and unload mods and reload the UI in-game.

10) Necrosis has some handy features, but it's not at all light on resources... you can accomplish the same thing by putting some buttons on a hidden actionbar. Try Shift+UP(or DOWN) and find an empty bar, put rarely need utility things there, Profit!

11) Good for you on oRA2/Grid... way better than CT_RA.

12) Perl Classic is a great lightweight UnitFrame mod... if you can live without it though you'd save more resources... I'm using a little Ace ditty called simpleUnitFrames right now.

13) SCT is the standard, I know, but you might try unloading it and using the default functionality for a couple days. Blizz's built in SCT is actually pretty decent, and saves loading another couple mods into memory

14) Servitude: see Necrosis. Same deal. Make a couple macros that handle common pet actions and have appropriate behavior depending on which pet you have out.

15) Depending on what options of Skinner you're using, it could be a resource hit. I felt like this mod was pretty lightweight when I used it though.

16) Now I see you have sRaidFrames... and Grid... you don't need both. Choose one or the other and run with it. Personally I like Grid, but sRaidFrames is closer to CT_RA look.

17) Titan; NO YUO! Go get FuBar now!

18) vBagnon: I've never used this one, but the OneBag/OneBank/MrPlow combo is pretty nice and very low on resources

19) No idea what WoWEcon is, but I'm guess it's a database and that it takes up lots of ram... like Auctioneer... only load it on a bank/AH alt when you need it.

God that's a long list of mods! Get rid of the ones you dont' actually NEED!

[memetootoo]

WOW thats a lot of help, and in my defense mods that do the same thing are not loaded at the same time. I've been testing out mods to see what I like, and sometimes disable them but forget to delete :D

But thanks again everyone, appreciate all the time typing this up, esp. ewichern!

[Beruen]

Also, I find that running FireFox at the same time as WoW has a major impact on my performance if I'm running with a lot of AddOns. In fact, while I was still using Cosmos, I would get 60 FPS solid just about anywhere, but as soon as I tabbed away and started FireFox, the FPS dropped to 15-20, and would return to 60 as soon as I closed FireFox. This is on an AMD 3500+ with 1.5G of RAM, so RAM shouldn't have been THAT much of an issue. Switching to Ace/FuBar from Cosmos dramatically improved things, but I can still get as low as 30 FPS if FireFox gets busy. I'm considering using Opera as my browser when WoW is running to see how much of a difference that makes. IE has less of an impact, but I don't trust IE very much.

[det]

I tend to right click my interface folder and see what size it is currently. (12 MB atm). No idea how much memory they will eat up when the game runs, but even Necrosis had like 7 MB..and for "just" a warlock mod that is too much when I can get similar results with my bar mod which has 5 MB and a configurable UI to boot

Gonna take a look at FuBar next...Titan uses 1.5 MB of memory, lets see how slim FuBar is...CTRaid at 2.5 MB was always essential, but lately it seems to mess up certain things and I might disable it until I actually raid again...Has a nice mass mail mod though....

[Alcoholicclown]

I myself use approximately 140 mods, many of which are cooperative (xperl, fubar, Metamap etc) and after doing so for about a year ive gotten used to dealing with the FPS issue as well as all the troubles that come during patches. the 2 best pieces of advice i can give is

#1 turn down everything in WoW; texture/spell detail, terrain distance, everything. the game isnt as pretty but it saves a ton of FPS, particularly the distance you can see in the world.

#2 on your AddOn screen change the memory usage to 0, yes 0, when its set at 0 instead of a specific number your computer will use whatever amount of ram it needs instead of devoting a specific chunk to running AddOns (ie if you set the value to 96mb then itll always use that 96 even if its not necessary)

#3 if your computer doesnt have over a gig of ram WoW will be real taxing on your memory while its running. so make sure you have as few programs running outside WoW(including firefox and things like that) as possible

if your like me and turning off most of your mods isnt an option then using smaller ones is nice, consider replacing titan with Fubar (although fubar seems rather buggy since the last patch) and if you actually participate in endgame raiding regularly you may want to look into Xperl instead of classic Perl. Anything that has/creates/maintanes a database also uses a lot of memory so consider turning them off when your not in need of whatever they do (turn off auctioneer when your raiding/questing/farming, itll help a lot)

you also use a lot of mods that have similar functionality and running them both is wasteful. for example, Itemrack should be able to do whatever Weaponquickswap can do if you actually create gear sets with it

RAM is very important though, dont let em fool you, i used to get around 15-20 FPS with 100 or so mods on and 512mb of RAM in SW, i added a full Gig on top of the 512 and i now get 30-40 FPS with 120+ mods on AND i can run programs outside of wow much easier now, which matters if you listen to music and stuff outside wow.

[Urooj]

@beuren firefox shouldnt really be making a performance hit. if it's making a difference, especially that big of one, my guess is that the pages you're browsing have animated frames in them (you know, the shoot the spaceship games and the like) i never notice any perf hit at all unless something like that goes up

[Urooj]

@memetootoo - one suggestion i have is to get warmup from www.wowace.com/files , toss that in, turn on all your mods (yes even doubles if you havent decided on them yet), type /wu , and go through the stuff that's in there. it isn't an end-all be-all way to determine what's more lightweight (500 kb mod doesnt display much, 25kb shows fireworks all over the screen at 64b...hmm, you do the math? :P ) but it's a good way to get a general idea of what's hitting your ram, and what's taking a really long time to load. if it takes a long time to load, theres a fair chance it's doing a lot of stuff you might not need.

*note* i dunno if it's just mine, but mine starts already scrolled to the bottom, so be sure to mousewheel scroll the window up all the way before you start lookin at it.

[Tunga]

No idea how much memory they will eat up when the game runs, but even Necrosis had like 7 MBThe reason for this is simple: it has graphics. Only a very small number of mods have graphics included in them. And actually these image files don't generally cause a big performance hit relative to the amount of memory that they take because displaying a static image is not CPU intensive whereas something like parsing your combat log after every event is. So using the size of a mod to determine its resource usage is a bad idea.

[Urooj]

aye, tunga, it's not the best way to be sure. but its more than you have by looking at the folders and saying 'hmm'. also as to the size being a bad indicator, you said yourself not many mods use graphics :P i just meant it's a place to start, while he's waiting for responses on here.

tidbit: ctra was noted as one of the worst load/play speed hits, and it did come up as one of the highest marked on warmup :P