Confessions of an Addon Junkie

My load times have been sucking badly. I've been dual-boxing for a week and I noticed that my second account's client loads in about 10% of the time it takes my "main" client to load.

I hopped on an unplayed alt and disabled everything. All addons. Typed /reload. The game came back lightening fast of course. I also noticed my frame rate had almost doubled.

That was hopefully the intervention I needed to start my journey towards recovery.

Prioritizing - What do I really need?

Just one more! I'll start on Monday! 

I had to get rid of something. A quick skim through my three pages (yes, three!) of addons in Addon Control Panel (yes, another addon itself) didn't reveal any obvious candidates for the bit bucket.

So I asked myself "what do you like to do most, and what do you need to do it?"

I gots to make goldz!!! Gold-making, crafting, etc is one of the primary ways I enjoy the game, so the auction house addons stay - I use TradeSkillMaster and Auctionator. TSM is pretty big, but provides a lot of utility.

I enabled it, all its sub-addons, and Auctionator and hit reload. Still very fast, no noticiable difference.

Over and over I basically repeated this process checking the load time and then frame rate once I logged in. I also used, eh hem, another addon to check how much memory and CPU each addon is using. (broker_CPU I think its called).

Through this process I determined I probably don't need TellMeWhen, Power Auras, and Watcher all at the same time - not on each of my toons anyway.

Getting rid of the bad guys...

I also learned that my formerly new favorite inventory addon, Baggins, is a huge memory hog and that go looking for a suitable replacement. I found Combuctor which behave much more nicely and does things better actually. It also works better alongside Bankstack.

There are a lot of cool little addons that really don't effect performance at all but do very nifty things when you need them to. For example FasterCamera which changes the speed of the camera zoom. My god did that need fixed. This is an example of an addon I don't really "need" but it basically costs nothing to have enabled. It stays.

I stayed up too late last night repeated turning things back on and checking, sometimes finding replacements. Finally I managed to cut my load time to about 25% of what it was and I'd say I maintained at least 80% of the collective functionality of my former stack of addons.

tl;dr

Lessons learned:

1. Some addons are resource hogs - just because they're popular doesn't mean they aren't bloated

2. Redundancy is not my greatest asset when it comes to addons.

3. Know the difference between need and like. Remember the game is actually playable without any addons installed at all.

For the comments, name three addons you can't live without, and name the first one you have enabled now that you would delete.