Intermittent Freezing Issue

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1

Hello,

For the last few weeks, I have been getting an issue where my game will suddenly freeze for about 1-1.5 seconds. It will happen fairly frequently, maybe 3-4 times a minute, and really disrupts my ability to play (it starts as soon as I log into any character and does not stop, no matter what I am doing or where I am in-game).

Outside of these freezes, everything runs very smoothly, so it has me pretty puzzled.

Things I’ve tried to fix it:
Change video options: No effect whatsoever. Running the game at “1” quality, the problem still occurs. Direct X 11, 12, Legacy has no effect.
Reinstall GPU drivers: I have a GTX 1070; Reinstalling drivers seems to make the problem go away for a short time, but it comes back.
Rollback GPU drivers: I almost thought this fixed it for good, but it again came back after I went back to a driver from before Shadowlands was released.
Change GPU’s: Swapped GPU’s (downgraded to a 1060), but the problem persists.
Disable addons in the game’s “addons” section: No effect. I play with a lot of addons, but this issue started happening after I had been playing with them all for a long time without any trouble.
Delete Interface & WTF Folders: Does not seem to affect the issue by doing this only, but see below.
Fully re-install the game: This makes the problem almost completely gone, but as I gradually reinstall addons (a few at a time), it re-emerges and then will not go away when I disable them.
Reinstall Windows: No additional effect.
Disable Automatic Updates: No additional effect.

My conclusion is that it must have something to do with my addons, or at least that the are contributing to the issue, but I am at a loss on how to correct the problem and still play with the interface settings I like, as I used to be able to just a few weeks ago. I really love this game, but not being able to feel like I’m in control at all is making me want to stop playing.

Is there anything I can provide that could help someone see what’s happening for me? I’m not super literate when it comes to troubleshooting, and what I did above is really all I could think of besides searching the internet for a solution (I found a few posts with similar problems around, but none of the solutions have worked for me).

Thanks so much for anything you all can suggest,
Lavabursinin

2

Disabling addons only prevents them from appearing visually on the screen, and does not prevent them from running in the background. A better way to test this is to rename the Add-ons folder and then try running the game.

As for starting only recently, assuming you’ve been keeping add-ons update, one of the updates may be causing problems. These aren’t pieces of software that Blizzard maintains, so making sure they work properly with the game is up to the individual developers of those add-ons.

If you do the above steps and still have issues, then you’d want to provide the files asked for at the top of the forum:

https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/common-technical-issues-and-solutions/22912/23

4

Thank you for the info! I went ahead and added my DxDiag file, but I did not know that disabling addons doesn’t stop them from running.

That makes a lot of sense with what I was seeing, but even after renaming the entire AddOn folder, it seems like the issue is still happening. Hopefully there’s something in my log that provides a clue.

5

The d drive is very low on free space. If that’s where wowor your swap file are that could be causing the issue.

6

Update: I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I think I may have finally fixed this problem. I believe it was being caused by a windows appearance setting (desktop background changing and windows theme dynamically updating its colors).

I disabled these settings, and the problem has stopped completely. I feel like a dope. Thanks to both of you who replied! Without your replies I probably would not have thought of this, so I really appreciate it. Now I can enjoy the game again!

I will see myself out.

7

Thanks for reporting back. I highly recommend Zungar’s advice, also. Even if it’s not an apparent problem, having one drive perform slowly can affect the performance of the others. You want to keep 12-15% free space on all drives that are connected.

8

Thanks for the piece of information, too!

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