There is definitely something strange going on and I suspect it is in the caching. My FPS went south with 2.1 and I played around a fair bit (deleting the cache, resetting my router and so on) before oddly hitting on a solution. For me at least, tabbing out and back in will instantly clear up my framerate issues but they do recur on zoning into certain areas or over an extended period of time. Quite strange.

By the way sp00n, are those really your FPS right now? I cannot imagine a scenario where an average of 290 would occur but then again, I'm no graphics guru. Those still look more like latency numbers to me though =)

As I've noted, these are my FPS when I run without any addon, standing against a wall in an empty area with all the way zoomed in so that I only see - a wall. No character, no pets, no chat, no nothing. Just a wall (and the action bars of course).
Basically I've tried to eliminate everything that could affect the FPS despite the macros which I wanted to test.

Normally, when I'm in a raid and have all my addons activated, I have around 10-20 FPS in SSC for example. :/

Since patch 2.1 any raid for me was practically unplayable. I used to use a /startattack /backstab macro for easy tab targetting while still always autoattacking. When I came across this topic I decided to stop using this macro and delete all unused macros I had ever created. Strangely enough, this did fix my fps issues. I can't explain it but maybe this information can help someone else's fps issues.

The following macro was something I used for most of my spells to do a buttonmash-trinketcrit by pressing alt+1:

/cast [modifier:alt] Blood Fury
/use [modifier:alt] Xi'ri's Gift
/cast [modifier:alt/shift] Elemental Mastery
/cast Chain Lightning;

I have deleted the Frostshock, Eartshock versions of this one, and experienced 5-10 more FPS in the spelleffect-heavy Aran fight (before this, it was basically unplayable, I tried to stare mostly at the ground to gain 1-2 FPS).

While my FPS went up a bit after deleting these, I also noticed that even processing this macro also eats up lots of resources; when I mash it, my FPS drops to 1-2 for a sec before the casting begins. Putting Blood Fury, the trinket and EM to different non-macro action buttons and pressing them in an order seems to be a better solution nowdays than writing marcos...

So in short this affects ALL macro modifiers even some as simple as /mount [noflying] etc?

Most likely.

We need to test this out for macros with nonflying/flying mounts
and more importantly for raiding mages: sheep macros that uses focus targets


edit:
/cast [flyable,nomounted] Swift Purple Windrider; [nomounted] Purple Skeletal Warhorse
/dismount [mounted]

/focus [target=focus, noexists]; [target=focus, dead]; [target=focus, help]
/stopmacro [target=focus, noexists]
/cast [target=focus] Polymorph: Turtle

So I thought funky was onto something and complained in the Tech Support forum when he first posted this, and Blizzard have confirmed it is an issue now

Elitist Jerks helping to make the World of Warcraft a better place =)

What has the bank to do with your macros?

Can you link to that thread?


Anyway, good to know that we weren't hunting ghosts.

The bank is just a set of bags that the game doesn't let you see if you aren't near a banker. It's possible that the code for conditional macros involved a scan of inventory items each frame (for whatever reason, feature or bug) that also included the bank bags.

The blue post that was quoted can be found here.

Funky?

Nah, it was I who kept pestering them over and over. :P

With the conditionals (#show) the more you have, the more options must be looked at each time.

Say I have a macro thats the question mark and its just "/Use 13" to activate a trinket

If I have 2 trinkets, it has to find the appropriate icon to replace the question mark twice

If I carry 20 trinkets, engineering gimmicks, quest rewards, and so on, it has to find the appropriate icon from amongst 20 sources

Now imagine its doing the same thing every time it has an internal *tick* and its easy to see why the second scenario eats up huge loads of processor time every second

Does this mean only macros with the red question mark slow down my fps or do I also need to add #show if I picked one of the other icons in the list when creating a macro?

Any macro with a conditional in it. Like [target=player].

To fix either add something like:
#show none
or
#show <name of spell>
or
#showtooltip <name of spell>

The question mark itself didn't seem to have any influence on performance.
It was just the tags ([combat] & [nocombat]) and /castsequence that was reducing frame rate for me.

Now I haven't tested if #show spellname helps (too lazy), but #show without a spellname certainly doesn't.

I assume it's all conditions in [square brackets], but I only tested the combat ones.

Pretty much any of the [something] conditionals. In my case it was a lot of [target=player] and such ones. I tried their solution of #show (well I chose #showtooltip <spellname> and it fixed the problem.

So yes, it does appear to work.

I use many macros as follow:

#show
#showtooltip
/cast [modifier=alt]Growl, Maul

Basically, if I use the macro, it hits Maul, if I hit the macro with alt, it taunts. I like the visual feedback on the action bars and I don't like having a blank tooltip. Any way around it or am I screwed either way? (low fps or an un-satisfactory macro)

You're basically screwed until 2.1.3 when they're supposedly fixing it as far as I can tell.

I'm really sorry if this writes somewhere already but, I would ask you to answer to my question; How to make a macro: i.e
/Target Frko
/Cast Shield(Don't know the right command tough)
This means target will stay on frko, but I want to if I'm targeting someone and do the macro shown above that the target still stays on him, not me. People told me something like /Previous &t and such.

Thanks for any answer, Frko.

Eeeeh, wrong thread?

But I *think* what you are looking for is /targetlasttarget (if that still works with 2.x, haven't ever used it myself).
Alternatively you can set a /focus on the mob/player you would like to stick to.