Dealing with lag

Well, I finally ran some real heroics last night, despite my self-imposed ban until I have proper professions. I got slaughtered of CoS; wiped on trash three times. Boss went well though.

I ran some other instances, however, and not only did well, but found them reasonably easy. Even ran UP. A lot of it was the healer change; my new healer was 4/5 tiered and in mostly epics, so my job was pretty simple. But I'm fairly certain the biggest difference was that my computer stopped wigging out.

For example, I'd pull, and about five seconds later I'd see the mobs teleport onto me... those I still had aggro on, anyway. One particular part stands out; I was struggling for threat because I had been pressing Shield of Righteousness for about five seconds straight and it still wouldn't cast. Compared to when we fought Skadi and I'm pretty sure the DPS took damage, like, twice through the whole event.

Now, I'm not the best tank in the world. I'm still new at this, but my computer is usually pretty good. I'm not sure if it's that particular instance or just that particular night. Does this bode ill for my raiding future? I bought the thing like four months ago, and I have a quality cable connection.

Any advice, in-game or out of game? The first thing I intend to do when I get home is mess with my addons.
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Damage meters can really suck down resources as you run them longer.
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It can be the addons?! This is great news! I have a really addon-heavy UI, and I suspected that might be it. I'm still polishing it up. However, I have an addon that can easily disable and enable addons while I'm playing, so... well I can fight fire with fire.

I have all the addons you mentioned except arkinventory, running ~80-90. Half of those are modules.

I'm thinking about just dropping Recount. I mostly had it because I was curious and all my friends did it (good reason for anything >_>), but now the only thing that I use it for is to try to compete with the warlock for DPS. I always forget to reset it... ever... so that's probably slowing me down a bit.

Thanks!
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Fubar has a plugin that lets you track addon throughput. I think mine use somewhere between 50 and 130 MB all the time. Make sure you got hardware-resources to support you UI :)

Also, are you playing windowed mode? Full-screen helps a lot if GPU is an issue.

Downloading stuff?
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Armory

Definitely getting the fubar plugin. That's a great idea. I had something like that for a while but I got rid of it when I was cleaning up some time back.

I'm not in windowed, though I do have dual-monitors. The other one is either turned off and empty or open to a browser page, generally wowhead, wowwiki, or maintankadin. I never run in windowed.

I live in a duplex with several other people using the router, but it's very high quality. So yes my internet does have times when someone is downloading. Probably not my PC, but I was up late enough that it might have been something automated.
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I can't tell if you're saying the your client is freezing on the same frame for 5 seconds, or that you're having no fps issues and the mobs are teleporting to you after ~5 sec. I'm thinking the latter, though, because of the non-registered spell click issues.

On most public broadband, torrents will completely wreck your WoW playability due to massive amounts of upload connections. If somebody on your router is using them, have them either limit the number of upload connections to 1-2 and cap the bandwidth to ~20kb/s, or simply stop during your play hours.

Yes, the latter. Okay, that makes more sense, that's connection lag, whereas the choppiness is graphics. I should know that. I wasn't sure if addons could add to the connection load.

I'll see if I can monitor my connection before I start pugging. Thanks again.

Also, getting stunned next to the white ball of death in UP FTL.
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The only mods that increase bandwidth usage, to my knowledge, are those that expand the range of the combat log (and I think I recall them defaulting that to max in the bliz ui, so that may not be an issue) or mods that sync between clients on a channel. Recount/SWStats/CTmods do some of these things, but even in the worst case, the actual bandwidth usage pales in comparison to the rest of the game data being transmitted.

In my experience, mods will only show detrimental changes in performance in the CPU/mem usage areas. Auctioneer and questhelper eat tons of both of those, as do any of the logging utilities the support real time graphing, etc. Most button/frame mods should not cause a change to your game performance.

I love Arkinventory, but it's been very buggy for me.

I run all of the heavy load add-ons you mention, and I notice lag only in a few cases:

Sartharion, when DBM announces the lava wall, my computer freezes for about 1 second. I can usually make it to the safe spots still though.

PVP in Wintergrasp. As soon as the walls go down and people flood into the CY, it's game over for me. I push my holy shield button, die, resurrect, and THEN holy shield will actually cast. It really is that bad.

Otherwise, even running all those addons and more, those are the only places where I really notice any lag.

What version of Windows are you using? If it's Vista, you need to disable some indexing services and some other crap. I had nothing but problems until I did that.
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I ran a 25 man last night with nothing loaded except omen, pallypower and bigwigs and I had zero lag. thanks for the tips.
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