I was actually thinking along the OP's thoughts - startup is unbearably slow, and long play sessions would result in alt-tab going from "smooth" to "suck".

I was digging around doing voodoo that probably has no effect when I was going through SavedVars\ and... in a directory where most files are ~10kb (and that's rounding up.. a *lot*), SW_Stats has a 1.6 megabyte saved variable lua. Now, it's true that file size, performance, and runtime memory usage aren't necessarily correlated - a very small addon with no saved variables can easily just go through every byte of memory tossing a "1" in there, for example - but I gotta think that's a MASSIVE contributor.

Turned that off, and I guess the followup question is - does anyone have a sleek, minimalist damage meter addon that ONLY tracks a handful of stats (damage, and healing in any combination of raw, over, real) for party (raid) members ONLY? Reading through the LUA, I understand that there's simply no way to keep the level of information and meaningfully compact it, so I'm happy to lose information. I don't care if someone shadowbolted 10 times anymore versus incinerated, or what. The event parsing in combat is not a slowdown. It's startup, and accumulation.

I also think the difference with Pitbull's frame recycling vs. agUF has gotten rid of my "alt tabbing after a long play session" issue.

Also, has the verdict changed on using !!!StandAloneLibs or not?

The overall 'hit' to your performance between using PitBull and agUF is probably so insignificant (especially if you're not using the raid frames) that it's not something I doubt very many would notice. Although it's written with performance in mind, there is probably a point where the same amount of frames are in use by both addons, especially in long sessions without a relog or reloadui. Just something to keep in mind.

Also, if you want to keep with the "Ace2" tradition, Violation is the lightweight minimal data equivalent of DamageMeters. It does, however, require that each user have it running for their data to be tracked.

On the subject of loading times and using or not using stand-alone libraries, this thread over on the Ace forums is pretty interesting in that regard.

To summarize: By default using the stand-alone libraries doesn't really provide as much of a loading time increase as you might expect, because WoW tries to load a whole bunch of files that don't exist, causing some slow down as the .toc's refer to the embedded libraries. Later posts in the thread have a Python script which goes through your addons folder and which comments out any non-existing files in the .toc.

I've personally found that doing so really makes a noticeable change to your loading times.

I'm a big fan of warmup + KLHP when I need to figure out which mod is causing a specific issue. 2.1 should be a huge boon, though. Maybe I can finally get my girlfriends computer to stop grinding to a halt. I think, though, that her problem is with video drivers. The NVidia control panel errors when I try to run it; clean install or no. I should see if I can get a her a good copy of XP, that might help,...

Setting your max UI memory to 0 and running /script collectgarbage("setpause", 110) after every login will give you GC fairly close to how it'll be done in 2.1. The main cause of GC-related freezes now is having the UI max memory under twice as high as the initial memory, resulting in the incremental GC threshold never being hit.

Hm, that might actually help her out. Initially I was referring to the per-addon usage statistic that we'll have available, but this is good info. I knew about setting UI mem to 0, but hadn't considered how it might be related to the performance issues. Thanks

You'd be surprised. Data from tonight's raid: KTM spend 2.0% of it's processor time parsing combat log events. As long as you don't make any algorithmic blunders, you could easily parse 1000 combat long strings a second without noticing a change in performance, which is far more than is needed.

KLH Performance Monitor, I'd bet
http://www-en.curse-gaming.com/downl...rmancemonitor/

PerformanceFu (requires Fubar) is a handy day-to-day tool for monitoring your UI space. It's a running display of your FPS, memory usage and increasing rate.

Instead of deciding if a mod is good/bad because of the size (barring the poorly written or buggy mod), as a general rule I find it easier to figure out a threshold of UI memory usage that I am comfortable with and try to limit myself to the number of addons that fit within that threshold. There are some addons that are relatively "heavy", like ArkInventory, that I will always find space in my UI for.

Also, everyone's threshold of performance-to-usability is different... aside from personal preferences, things such as hardware and latency also impact the user experience. For example, my new machine (core duo, crossfire, blah blah) can handle many more addons than my old one.

That was just with the command
/ktm test time

All the combat event parsing is done in the <regex> module, so have a look for <regex> in the <onevent> section. It's a bit messy and might require you to expand your main chatframe to read properly.

TekSupport is an alternate option to KLH Perf Monitor which is well-integrated with Ace.