Bad programming? Running out of memory (I have no idea if there is a memory or CPU cap on addons)?
Auctionator sounds like it was done by programmers who know what they’re doing. And understand the limitations of lua.
Here’s the source: https://github.com/Auctionator/Auctionator (What I looked at seems to be very good code.) Still unclear how they store data and am not interested enough to keep reading code.