Hi!

I've searched everywhere in the settings, helpfiles, wiki and the forum, but I can't find very much about this functionality. I desperately need to turn it off, but it doesn't seem possible by settings. I've even been going through the code hoping it was a simple matter of erasing a certain line somewhere, but haven't been able to safely isolate that part yet (but I am that desperate).

The reason I don't want it is because besides being completely unnecessary for me anyway (I regularly do full or category scans), it also interferes with other addons I use. I use the addon LilSparky's workshop for example, but also Quickauctions2. Whenever I open Sparky's workshop, it checks if Auctioneer has fresh data, and buffers the prices of all my craftables, which can take up to a minute. So whenever I sell something, check something, or anything else on auctioneer, there will be fresh data forcing that addon to recache again. It get's worse when I mass cancel/sell with quickauctions, because long after that addon is done, auctioneer is still processing each individual query. If I open any profession window and processing is still busy, it forces sparky's addon to constantly restart recaching each process, slowing my machine to a near standstill, sometimes resulting disconnects, but always in a very long wait with an unresponsive game.

Long story short. Is there any way to turn it off? and if not, could this please be implemented in a future version? I like auctioneer a lot, but lately I've been needing to turning it off more and more just because of this. I hope there's a nicer solution to this.

Cheers!

I'm pretty sure there is an option to disable scanning via the browse tab, but I am not in game to check.

Thanks for the quick responses!

@Matt:
Are you sure it's a necessary function? as long a as regular manually invoked scanning is done, it shouldn't add much extra and operate just like the classic auctioneer, scanning wise. About the other 2 addons, they work fine if I use them together with Auctionator f.e. It's the automatically invoked scanning by auctioneer that interferes with their operation, I can't see any way how they could fix that on their side: any addon requesting an AH search will invoke auctioneer to incrementally scan, there's doesn't seem a way around it.

@Apaseall:
I should add it has been getting worse lately and it wasn't very bad in the beginning too. This seems to have 3 reasons. The first is because the amount of concurrent auctions. I have are around 600 now, this influences it because QA searches a lot more items per run because of that, so a lot more per-item incremental scans. The second being the age of the database, because of heavy competition I'm forced to run QA scans often. The AA db seems to get fragmented quicky doing those scans and get's slower and slower, deleting the DB helps a bit, but it's a very temporary patch that works shorter and shorter. The last one is the amount of craftables available (for sparky). You won't notice much with professions where you've just got a basic set. When you've got +400 recipes sparky's caching takes quite while, and this is also influenced by the 2nd point, but even with a fast db, having a good set of craftables and having auctioneer+profession window open will cause slows. I have inscription with nearly every recipe f.e.

There is another thing I've noticed with point 2, but that's besides this. After having invoked a lot of those individual searches, the db seems to get corrupted. When I go to the appraiser the cache view often shows that I have many auctions going for an item, while in fact it's just 2. A refresh fixes this, but this does seem to happen when many incremental scans have been done, never after a manual full scan. This is also a reason for me to not want those incremental scans. It solves all of this and I can't see any downsides for regular full-scanners like me.

@Dinesh: I can't find any button to disable incremental scanning on the browse tab, just checked again. Is it perhaps a modifier key combo I can push?

Ok, so I've just accepted the problem for a while as the option doesn't exist, and I assumed from the responses there aren't any plans on adding it (though may I stress the need for it again!). For me it was slowly getting to a point that I either had to drop auctioneer, or dig in the code again and fix it. I do like the appraiser though and I have quite a few macros that use the lowest buyout functions from AA, so I chose the last option.

So, for those like me (and I know there quite a few) that want to get rid of that automatic scanning function that interferes with just about every other AH addon in existence, often causing incredible slows and sometimes disconnects, I've made a fix. The cause of the problem is that Auctioneer replaces an internal wow function with it's own, so any addon that thinks it's calling the internal warcraft auction interface is actually forced to use auctioneer, which in it's turn does a lot of processing. This functionality is a cool trick to help (just help) auctioneers database to stay up to date, but is completely useless if you run regular scans yourself. I fixed (removed) it by doing the following:

- Open the CoreScan.lua file in a decent text editor
- Rename the QueryAuctionItems function to something else, like QueryAuctionItemsAucAdv
- Rename all references to that function in the same way (make sure you don't rename any references that are preceded with private.Hook.)
- Remove the hook to the wow-internal QueryAuctionItems function (this line: private.Hook.QueryAuctionItems = QueryAuctionItems)
- Replace all references to the function private.Hook.QueryAuctionItems with the original QueryAuctionItems (so remove the "private.Hook." part)

Now what I did falls in the "hack" category, so even though after having tested it for a few days and only seeing everything running smoother and faster then ever before, beware that there might be a bug or two I didn't come across myself.

I hope you guys from Auctioneer make a real option to turn it off someday. Auctioneer is a great addon, but there is often the need to use other specialized addons besides it, like QuickAuctions f.e. Personally I also use Auctionator for it's great mass-buying and easy canceling functionality (hint :)). The thing is, in my testing experience it is only Auctioneer that is unable to work together with other AH addons, not the other way around, so perhaps a "safe mode" option that prevents the hijacking of warcraft internal functions would be a nice idea.

The MarketWatcher addon gets around this:


function MarketWatcher.QueryServer(name, minLevel, maxLevel, invTypeIndex, classIndex, subclassIndex, page, isUsable, qualityIndex, getAll)
if ( AucAdvanced ) then
AucAdvanced.Scan.Private.Hook.QueryAuctionItems(name or "", minLevel, maxLevel, invTypeIndex or 0, classIndex or 0, subclassIndex or 0,
page or 0, isUsable or 0, qualityIndex or 0, getAll);
else
QueryAuctionItems(name or "", minLevel, maxLevel, invTypeIndex or 0, classIndex or 0, subclassIndex or 0, page or 0, isUsable or 0, qua
lityIndex or 0, getAll);
end
end


I think LSW could be easily modified to not update pricing on each item scan, in LilSparkysWorkshop/pricingSupport/auctioneer_support.lua :

function lib.Processor(callbackType)
if (callbackType == "scanstats") then
--comment this line out LSW:FlushPriceData()
end
end


To my understanding, you are correct.
However, i'm as ... erm... moderate AH user, appreciate the on-the-fly snapshot update.
It allow me to cleanup search results from items already disappeared from AH.

Posted By: ApaseallCan someone spell out for me what is being discussed in this thread as I am uncertain?

From my understanding, Auctioneer intercepts the Blizzard QueryAuctionItems() function so that it can do processing on each manual scan from the default Browse tab. If another addon calls this function repeatedly, it results in Auctioneer doing a lot of processing. This would probably be an issue if another addon is quickly calling this function several hundred times in order to scan, say, each individual glyph just before posting each one.

Boom. This in fact the issue i've faced several times.
I'm in instnce, initiating pull... and my whole screen froze and server disconnecting me in a minute.

Actually rather than asking all other addon authors to modify their addons to account for something auc-adv has done surely the simplest answer is to make a change in auc-adv.
Having an addon (auc-adv) that forces all other addons touching that area to check to see if that addon (auc-adv) is present seems unexceptably bad practice.

Having an addon (auc-adv) that causes other addons to crash wow is unforgivable.

(just my thoughts)

--edit--
Surely the fix is something simple along the lines of:

auc-adv function that replaces blizz function()
if safe mode
do blizz thing
else
do auc-adv thing

to clarify:

* the incremental scanning is a feature of Auctioneer Advanced. In fact, it was the first feature. it pre-dates implementation of any scanning functionality. it is from a time when norgs was considering having auctioneer (advanced) not even have any scanning, and just having prices update dynamically based on searches. (mostly because that is how he used the AH primarily)

* i am 95% certain that we used to have an option to turn off dynamic updates, but i have no idea when it disppeared.

* even if you have just done a getall scan, there is still a value in having dynamic updates on to update the snapshot as things are purchased and listed (by you and by others).

I am in agreement that we should add the ability to turn off dynamic updating within Auctioneer, rather than force other applications to insert targeted defensive code that checks to see if we are installed before doing whatever it is they want to do.

aside: i have never used bossnotes2, so i have no idea what the conflict is. however, i wouldn't put all my eggs into having this change solve that problem - i sorta doubt that it will, unless BN2 has queryauctionimage hooked somehow, which i rather doubt. possibly it's related to the name resolution queue, which will get massively delayed if you've done a getall scan within the 5-10 minutes previous.

aside 2: no, it is not as easy as "if safemode". we will have to carefully inspect the entry points into our core scanning code and devise an option. having said that, it should be straightforward, if not easy.

Yes, it is intentional. Hooking functions is pretty standard in addon development. basically, you hook a function when you want to modify the default functionality somehow. in our case, when someone performs a default browse pane search, we want to hook the function call so that we can do some additional stuff (read: "scan" the auctions returned and add them to our snapshot image, update statistics, etc.).

http://www.wowwiki.com/Hooking_functions may be helpful.

I think, in this isolated case (QA2 vs. AA) QA2 must give up and stick to best coding practice.
Hammering API with endless calls of one slow function (any data access function considered slow, unless you accessing cached data storage, that speed up retrieval for a price of actuality) is a bad ju-ju.

To my understanding, AA mimick Blizzard behavior, while adding necessary own stuff.
Then, what's the real issue?

i'm late to the party here, but i'll chime in with how lsw is impacted (and how it's impacting other things).

the way lsw works currently, any update to the cache fires off a recomputation of prices. i don't have individual times for each item, instead i simply have a "cache is dirty" flag that is set when new data is available (after the cache has been updated by auc-adv). this means the next update to the tradeskill frame with want to redraw the lsw values which in turn will cause a full recompute cycle (and caching of those newly computed values). depending on the pricing module, this might be a long process for little actual gain -- particularly if there are a number of scans being performed in sequence.

what would seem to make the most sense would be a throttle system for auc-adv's triggering of the "new items in cache" callback. something like waiting 5 seconds after the last scan before firing off the callback -- if a new scan comes in during that time, then reset the timer. this would hopefully only fire off a single lsw recompute and only with the most up-to-date values.

Voted for.
I like the suggestion of a throttle system to reduce the number of updates other addons etc when multiple scans are done in a short period of time.

Here are a couple of thoughts that popped into my head, just sharing them.

Prehaps a wrapper ?
Say function A is what is used atm. Each scan broadcasts a message after the scan is complete. Works fine for single scans i.e. scans with long pauses between repeats. Causes issues that initiated this discussion.

Say function B is made. This would appear to function exactly like function A if scans are made with pauses above a certain time x.
Function A called when single scans are made, function B called when multiple scans are made ie batch post ?

Function B calls function A but with a passed parameter to stop function A from broadcasting itself. Therefore function A contains all the good code and no duplication.
Function B only broadcasts if time > x or at end of batch post queue.

Great discussion. I always wondered why LSW would keep updating itself every second as I was doing search ui bottomscans.