Blizzard just announced that they are implementing a hotfix that will throttle inspect requests.
After the next set of rolling restarts, Blizzard will be implementing server-side throttling of inspection requests from addons. This may cause any addon that uses player inspection to not function properly after the restarts.
This throttle is being activated in order to reduce server load from some addons that use the inspection system. Currently any addon can request inspection data from the server as often as they want, and this problem seems to have gotten worse with the new patch.
Now, before everyone starts jumping up and down with glee, they are not breaking Gearscore. It will continue to function. They’re trying to keep Gearscore (and other addons) from breaking raids.
In our raids, we actually ban the use of certain addons, like Gearscore and the huge killer, Carbonite, during raid time. The problem is that these addons cause so much addon traffic, or so many inspect requests, that in the already high-demand raid environment they contribute to higher latency and numerous disconnects. I mean, significantly contribute.
You put a full raid of people running Gearscore into a 25-man raid, and the people with weaker internet connections and/or machines will be DCing regularly. It’s amazing the difference that you can see when you turn off some of these resource hogs. We then use SpamFu to monitor what addons people are running.
I’m very pleased that Blizzard is doing something about the inspect requests at least. Now instead of instantly replying to the addon inspect requests, it may be several seconds before the server replies — and if the addon is repeatedly spamming inspect requests to the server repeatedly, there are some suggestions that some of those requests might never get responded to, which should kill the sloppily coded addons that are, by definition, the worst offenders at contributing to lag and DCs.
Go Blizzard!
Great Info…Thanks!!
I’ve always wondered what add ons might be hurting performace. I will let my raid know this. Is there any way ot tell if any other or doing the same.
Thanks.
Exactly and precisely right. It’s a shame that Blizz had to employ this method to keep certain addons from impacting gameplay for others.
@ASDF – there’s an addon called addonspamfu or something like that that will show you who the biggest offenders are for message traffic, if you’re curious.
http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-addons/details/fu-bar_addon-spam-fu.aspx
Well, it’s certainly a step in the right direction! Thanks for the Spamfu addon info – good to know for a raid leader. Now if we can just get rid of GearScore completely…Blizz could do this by removing item levels from gear…afterall, ilvl 251 gear is often better than ilvl 264, so why bother putting it on in the first place? Doesn’t tell you much about the gear itself. Removing it would make people actually look at the gear stats before deciding if it’s better.
now if only someone could come up with a addon that monitored a players ability.
that would be worth the lag.. WOOT.
Seems like a reasonable and measured solution to the issue. /cheer Blizzard.
I say kill gearscore. If a raid leader is that concerned about a players gear they should hit up wowheroes – and actually look at what gear the player is running with, enchants and gems they use. A flat numerical score based on iLvl is helping lazy people put together raids which seem to fall apart after the first wipe. You can have a wonderful GS it could be the wrong type of gear for that toon, unenchanted and ungemmed or incorrectly gemmed. Its lazy raid leaders who end up breaking the raid through poor choices of players!
Its good that Blizzard are working towards cutting down on these sort of addons to improve the quality of the gameplay. Especially encounters like Onyxia (even if it is old content), Lady Deathwhisper and even to some extent Rotface- where there is a lot already happening in regards to adds and player movement.
@TheKnightOne, although I share all the frustration on the misuse on gearscore, we should stress it is missuse, not that the tool itself is broken.
The issue here is not that Blizzard agrees with us, on the usage of gearscore. No, they disagree with the way it is programmed. That is, the tool itself is broken as it is doing to much network requests. It is actually funny that gearscore itself was design to be able to look *offline* at gears, and seems to be doing massive *realtime* API requests.
The ‘please whisper GS’ madness is a different issue. It is in the same league as the ‘whisper achievement’ nonsense, but that won’t go away a bit with this fix and Blizzard has expressed no interest in addressing that.
Woot! Awesome to know this, since most of the people in my raid don’t actually know what mods they’re running
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But how much do you think it will actually help by? Will this change be a MASSIVE improvement? Or will we still have to get raid members to remove the mod to help with lag?
And as for all the GS QQers, Armin is right, theres nothing wrong with the mod, just with the people who live by it. GS is JUST a mod that gives you an idea about what the player’s gear is like, nothing else. I remember in the days before GS people asked “Are you geared?” If you said ‘Yes’, then you were in. You could still have useless gems/enchants, been babied through the raids or even bought your character but I don’t remember any crying about it back in that time.
And for those who say, ‘GS is useless, go to Wow-heroes/Armory to properly check their gear’, you DO remember that you can still inspect people right? Its a bit quicker then alt-tabbing and gets the same job done. Just inspect them when they get to the raid/Dalaran, say, ‘Hey, Hunter! your gemming for strength!’, then kick them.
Very nice. Maybe I’ll start to use that addon again.
Or maybe not. You see, at least on our server, the Gscore addon is innappropriate to describe a player. This is particularly true in Hunters.
In addition to the common scenario of gearscore being that it is higher than the skill level of the player, we can also have what I’ve come across as an itemization issue. The issue is that some Hunters do not have their tier 10 bonuses, which is a huge DPS loss. Instead they have the tier 10 264 off pieces. So in effect they have a higher gscore, but no big pew pew due to the bonus.
I’ve also noticed that some people will pursue complete ArPen. This one in particular says I should get this upgrade, I should get that upgrade, get rid of that, you need more ArPen and less stats. Which is totally wrong. It turns out when I inputed her wall o’ text into Female Dwarf, it came out as a DPS loss compared to what my DPS would be with my list of gear upgrades. The kind of stuff she suggested was the weapon from ToC, getting rid of my Haste weapon (Distant Land), and other ArPen alternatives. I would have lost huge itemization in order to not even hardcap it. =/
Just my two cents, or I should say pence…
If I inspect some1 on game, how it makes traffic between my target and server? I can understand traffic between me and server.
Aaand
if inspecting is bad, why they also limited /who querys ?
@Kehet – OK, one at a time, and this applies not to just Gearscore but others like it.
First, effect on other players. No, I doubt it hits the other client – that sounds like a bad idea to allow, now that I think of it – but the cumulative effect of this addon on multiple people in an area adds up on the server side so that it won’t respond to YOUR client trying to, say, feign death to avoid dying.
Secondly, there is a huge difference between the amount of traffic generated by /who and by Gearscore. It does an inspect of someone in the area multiple times a second, probably as fast as it can, and in a crowded place like dalaran, that adds up fast, especially when there are multiple people running it at the same time.
On the other hand, a human using /who can’t even come close to that magnitude of spam.
Oh, and, incidentally, /who IS being throttled. You just will never, ever, ever notice it because you can’t physically hit the limit
Inspecting isn’t bad. It’s letting robots do it excessively that causes the problem.
Each of these addons can be configured to not use so much memory… Recount is another hog that tries to Sync data with all other recounts in the raid if you don’t tell it not to.
O geez – I have been having disconnection issues for a month and was fooling around with Leatrix and other addonts…know I read here that its GS. Thanks so much for the post, I will pass onto our guild ASAP.
I got a pretty state of the art computer and hardly get disconnected however the internet in Australia is not the best and in my area we only get ADSL 1 but never really thought about my addons causing raid lag or even worse disconnects for some people. I always thought it would only be affecting me by leaving on addons not and everyone else in the raid thanks for the heads up as I use carbonite and gearscore lite.
Frost, I would make a request of you. Could you please post a Top 5 or Top 10 list of the worst offenders of this problem? Thanks, and thank you for the original post, as well.