With latest release (r711-release-2), but probably from releases before that one and a default config of the addon, hovering the minimap freezes the game for seconds every single time, making it pretty much unusable for the minimap icon related features.

Is this the first time you've used the addon or did something change to introduce a problem? We recently improved the performance of the tooltip rendering, but depending on your sort mode it could still be somewhat slow.

See also:

• #400 (the remaining issue, which can't easily be fixed)
• #399 (a possible way to fix this, which hasn't yet been implemented or even tried)

In your case, a workaround might be reducing the number of items displayed (by hiding categories you don't need), as well as trying the other sort modes.

I'm a returning player, I believe I used rarity years ago and don't remember experiencing such issues back then. Here I'm using default config, changed nothing and forgot about the existence of the minimap icon until it came back by default with recent version release.

So, I believe it used to not have such issue with default config, and the default one shouldn't risk such complete game freeze (everything freezes, not only the addon tooltip).

Nothing has changed in Rarity that would affect the performance negatively (in fact, the aforementioned changes vastly improved it). However, since there are now many more items that Rarity tracks, weaknesses in the Lua/C++ interfaces exposed by the WOW client have come to light and that's why many items slow down the UI. I assume that's why you didn't experience similar problems before; there just wasn't very much to display so the slow WOW UI didn't matter a lot.

This is the part we can't easily fix, so a workaround will be the best we can do (see the above issues).

The default settings don't use the "sort by zone" method, but rather "sort by category". The freeze is your WOW client accessing its internals in order to render the UI, which is outside of Rarity's control. The sorting causes no visible delay unless you're using the one sort method (sorting by zone) which is still too slow, but rendering the UI does cause noticeable slowdowns (as described in the issues I linked).

If this isn't a separate problem, I will close this as a duplicate since we already are tracking these problems (see above). That doesn't mean it's irrelevant, just that we don't need another open issue to be reminded of it :)