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Q u o t e:
I have done *some* testing of this issue, when someone was experiencing what they called "horrible lag in IF" and asked me to take a look at their WoW setup. As was pointed out before by others in this thread, the initial few seconds of freezing and subsequent framerate are two different things.

I beleive the initial freeze has lot less to do with server->client data transfer than the client loading textures from disk. There are several pieces of evidence to support this:

1) Try logging in in the middle of IF, but facing the wall. Wait for all HD activity to cease, and for reasonable time to have passed for any server->client information about people around you to have necessarily been received. Now turn 180 degrees to face the crowd: you get the freeze, on a powerful machine for a second or so, on a weak machine up to even a minute. Since this freezing occurs not when you enter the area but when the characters are first rendered by the client, I am tempted to blame it on texture loading.

2) Lowering certain video settings, in particular turning off Trilinear Filtering can significantly lower the length of the "freeze" experienced. In addition, if you stay stationary, you can see people in your immediate vicinity popping into view (as opposed to just being black shadows on the ground) faster.

Disabling Trilinear Filtering also dramatically improved the subsequent framerate on machines that were very "laggy" in Ironforge. I have also discovered that on machines with 512Mb memory or less, if you have the video options cranked up, WoW actually uses up more memory than is physically available when you enter crowded areas (IF, entrances to BGs etc.). This of course forces the machine to start paging to the HD continuously, which in turn causes extreme slowdown.

The last piece of evidence is that if you are lucky, often you can run around in IF, with people appearing as shadowy spots on the floor, moving about. You then get the freezes when people start to "pop" into existence at those spots. To me this suggests the server->client information flow is perfectly fine and it's the client that has to pause to load textures.

I would therefore conclude that in crowded areas by far the biggest load on the client is having to load the textures.

EDIT: AddOns can help somewhat with lag in IF, to a limited extent. One could write an AddOn that, with the click of a button say, sets those video options to lower settings that take effect without game reload (e.g. Texture Detail).

There are also some advanced settings normally stored in the Config.wtf file but that don't show up on the Video Options screen, which can be changed from script using ConsoleExec() calls.

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Q u o t e:
Probably someone thought about it before, but what about making the AH in an "instance" like the tram between IF and SW?

(I know it's not really an instance, but it separates people...)

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[ post edited by slouken ]