Authors CurseForge

This post at EJ piqued my interest:
http://elitistjerks.com/f15/t40955-wow_performance_issues_tweaks_etc/p12/#post1180505

I thought I'd throw few questions to the great minds at work here.
1. Can addon spam be blocked by other addons for example?
2. What addons are known spammers? (excessively so)
3. What is acceptable amount of data for the addons to transfer via their hidden channels?
4. What (if anything) addon-community could do to combat spammy coding practices? (whitepapers, wiki, best practices, etc.)

For the second question I was already told HealBot is spammy. I checked yesterday and it was so too, but Carbonite was ten times worse.

I'm assuing you're talking about the hidden addon channel?

1) no. Well written comm addons will have the minmum performance hit possible from addon channel spam
2) uh, bossmods and meters that think they need to sync everything, addons that constantly transmit data like the player's location
3) The minimum possible. You should take into heavy consideration what data you need to be sending out, both as a dev and as a user.
4) Bad addons are bad, regardless of if they're communicating or not. The only solution is to bitch at people that write or use bad addons.

Yes, I was referring to the hidden addon channel, thanks for clarifying that.

Continuing on your answers Tekkub (much appreciated btw)
2) Should we start blacklisting the known culprits as now it's not common knowledge or easy to discover which exact addons are behaving badly in this regard?
3) But are there hard numbers or measuring methods for deciding when the spam is excessive? At which point they will penalize the user in Pvp or Pve efforts? This is of course related to horsepower and bandwidth available, but still a research of sorts could be valuable.
4) True story, but wouldn't it be all that much easier if some people inside the loop would make a wiki or a whitepaper or best practices article on efficient addon communication? Sadly this can't be me as I'm not that much inside the loop myself. People could be advised to reading those in stead of individaual bitching per case.

It's hard to write up a "best practices" guide when the only best practice is "send only the minimum amount of data you need to". There's certainly tricks to compress the data you're sending, but in the end it's a matter of design really.

FYI, fubar_addonspamfu will give you some visibility into hidden addon channel traffic.

I think Prat might be able to mirror the raw traffic to chat frames as well, but I like addonspamfu for gathering overall statistics.

Reading the OP on the EJ thread, I know the question: I raid fine in 10 man but in 25 man my performance degrades badly.

I have that exact same problem on my system, but I am still after this many months unable to establish what the problem is.

1) I doubt it's addon traffic because I have virtually eliminated it's existance on my system.
2) I doubt that it's even addons in most cases because I have the same issue with addons disabled.
3) I did set almost all graphics settings to minimum, but spell effects can be crucial in some fights, so those have to be not minimum sometimes. Graphics settings changes are my main source for performance increases, and netted my roughly 10-20fps depending on the situation. (Flying with minimum terrain distance sucks :P)
3) I couldn't even establish that many addons I use even in a choked situation do significantly drop my FPS. I.e. if I raid at 6 FPS and I disable my most combat heavy addons I see a variation of frame rate of +/-1, i.e. an equal swing in both direction. Mean is 0. I.e. I fail to establish that the addons caused the FPS degradation.

I do know some extreme cases (crystal room WG defense of 60+ combatants each side spamming AoE) where the system is so chocked that heavy addons will radically degrade performance, but that has to do with complete exhaustion of system resources so that anything, including background tasks of Windows have very detrimental effect.

But aside from these extreme situations I cannot really tell what the problem is. Typical burst moments include opening dialogue windows (trade for example), dying or leveling ding events. Heavy spell effect events.

I defragment frequently and cannot say that I feel it significantly changes anything.

But it could well be that it's actually network latency. I certainly have it that I fly around and suddenly have a freeze that recovers, very similar to the kinds of delays I see for death or ding events.

What is the actual cause for this I have no clue.

To the question at hand, I'm not sure it's established that the kind of network traffic a lot of addons these days produce is really the reason why people see their performance degrade in 25-man raids. I'd love to see some connection established. But all I have seen so far is guesses.

And yeah I've pretty much tried to figure out what this is about and my best theory is simply that 3.0.x WoW requires significantly more resources than before, and from my tests addons have a very minor role in the system degradation in various situations.

If anyone has found ways to test these things I'd be very happy to learn about it.

Quote from Allara

The most sobering thought here is, it seems that really any addon can choose to fire a bunch of random junk at you, regardless of if you have the addon installed. Is that true? I don't have X-Perl installed, and I'm pretty sure I don't have LibGuildPositions-1.0 installed or embedded anywhere, yet I get traffic from them. Seems like that's just trouble waiting to happen...

Yes, which is why addons watching the comm events need to write a VERY GOOD event handler for the addon comm event, so that they have the minimum possible performance cost when the comm isn't for them. Ideally this is a single string compare and immediate return out if the token doesn't match the token your addon is watching for.

I'm not sure if Addon spam can impact framerate, though I do tend to have FPS problems in 25 man raids despite having a very good system, but I believe most of my FPS problems are caused by SCT type mods, I'm hoping the new animation system will help, though that depends on those mods converting to use it.

I don't think that you have much more animations in 25 man raids then in 10 man raids .)

Quote from OrionShock

One thing i have noticed is while in raid if i turn the blizzard combat log OFF as in set no filters at all to where it shows nothing.. this really really helps my FPS.

Thanks, I'll try that.

Quote from OrionShock

with regards to the combat log, and elsia can probably attest to this; in a 25 man raid you would normally have all classes represented, and as such you have at least 4 or 5 raid wide buffs that are constantly being refreshed or applied or falling off. That CHURN in and of itself could account for alot of system side lag due to network traffic.

Consider the shaman melee buff, it's constantly being reapplied to the raid, that's 25 SPELL_AURA_*REMOVED, and 25 SPELL_AURA_APPLIED CLEU events firing. 2 for every member of the raid. that's alot of garbage to proccess tbh. Plus the awesomeness that is the combat log, there is alot of overhead there too.

Heh yeah when you have Rampage, Unleashed Rage, Abominations might, Improved Icy Talons, Ferocious Inspiration and probably a few other buffs constantly refreshing it causes a lot of spam, I use MSBT which allows me to suppress seeing all the spam but I'm sure the mod itself still has to process it all as does the combat log.