so its been a while since 2.1 and several of my guildies have been complaining about low fps, my fps being low as usual, i didn't really notice, until a guildie of mine, Copper, decided to investigate why.

Standing on the same spot, in the same place, with 0 addons, using different characters, he got different fps?

http://img369.imageshack.us/img369/1322/twinklela9.jpg high fps
http://img471.imageshack.us/img471/5740/copperlm2.jpg low fps

i couldn't explain it, i explained to him about renaming wtf to wtf.backup and whatnot for testing, and wtf hes fps goes up? so he does some investigating and finds out that it seems to be directly related to the amount of macros he is using.

http://img181.imageshack.us/img181/4201/fpswtfbb7.jpg

so i went through my macros doing a spring cleanup, i kept the vital ones and removed the silly ones and had the same fps increase, although it still sucks in SSC(minor 5fps increase), anyone else tried this?

Shouldn't matter, macros are basically really small addons even with the changes to add all of the new /castsequence and such they aren't doing anything that should be resource intensive.

Has he tried going to somewhere more deserted to make sure?

Different characters have different addon loading, *even if they have the same addons*, since per-character saved variables can be significantly different.

It really shouldn't have anything to do with macros.

neither had any addons loading, but the evidence is there

The only way that I can possibly think of for unused macros to cause performance problems is if they have large amounts of complex conditionals and those are being calculated OnUpdate even if they aren't on any buttons. If that's the case, then it's probably a bug you should report to Slouken.

If the macros test conditions in an "OnUpdate" type handler, and do it inefficiently, then this is believable.

For example, I can see maybe someone asleep at the wheel updating the macro icons once per actionbutton per frame instead of once per frame or something like that.

Do a lot of your macros use #showtooltip?
Perhaps we're doing something silly like pulling up tooltip information every update.

Do your macros use static icons, or dynamic icons (ie. the big red "?") - this may be related.

*shrug*

Not exactly true, basic macros that send a chat message don't do anything, but things like macros with modifiers or /castsequence still have to register events so the icons will change, or so it knows when to reset the sequence. The only macro that uses OnUpdate is /castsequence for knowing when to reset the sequence, everything else uses events that fire when you hold a modifier key down, change stances and so on.

he has had the fps issue ever since 2.1, and yet it was always fine on the mage(has no macros), i doubt every day he played it was a coincidence, also as i stated i tried it, and it worked for me also, and i had nothing running in the background.

Instead of wiping out all your macros, try removing any instances of:

#show
#showtooltip
/castsequence [timed reset]

And see if that affects performance. I would, but I'm supposedly working right now.

I added the reset time on castsequence, bc for each cast it starts an independent timer.

there is no instances of either of those

I've been having the same problems in 2.1 and the Blizzard tech support forums have been astonishingly unhelpful. I'm basically just re-learning to raid with 4-6 FPS during boss encounters, since I don't expect a fix...well, ever. I'm accustomed to 15+ FPS during those same encounters, which isn't great but is at least playable.