Originally Posted by VincentSDSH
If my memory serves, early on in WoW, recycling was a must b/c the garbage collection in the Lua implementation was done at a threshold and usually caused a perceptible effect on the game. The implementation used now has incremental garbage collection so it has largely removed the need to constantly recycle tables. So if it's a very old addon, that may be the reason it recycles; if it's only a few years old, there might be a good reason it recycles.
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Thank you, this was the sort of information I was looking for. I like to try to understand issues rather than just trying stuff and seeing what happens.
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The generic answer if you want to do a bit if work is: do a version w/o it and then profile each.
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Yeah, it generally comes down to that. I just wanted to understand the issue more before trying to decide whether I want to try to do that much work. If the answer was "WoW's GC is AWFUL, avoid at all costs", then I would approach it differently.
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Edit: I'm assuming Autobar is the addon. If so, I think it predates the incremental garbage collection so it'd recycle its tables. It's been years since I poked around trying to repair Autobar so I can't recall the kind of table usage it necessitates.
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Yes, it is AutoBar, so it's been around for quite a while and through at least 2 previous authors. Also, I believe it was partway through a rewrite when it was abandoned and I took over so I've found many parts that just don't work or were clearly never completed.