As most of you will have noticed the Auction house on the anniversary realms is very slow. I thought I’d talk about why!
The AH architecture
I expect a lot of you did not play Retail in BfA when Blizzard reworked the auction house. They changed how auctions work for stackable items, and there is a reason for that: Performance.
The AH architecture where stackable items are posted in specific stack sizes scales REALLY badly. In fact it was so bad that during BfA entire servers were being slowed down because of the AH. While I’m not privvy to the source code of WoW I’m assuming that the number of entries is really bad.
Biggest classic servers ever
The anniversary realms are the most populated classic realms ever. This combined with the old AH is a recipe for slowness. Blizzard is aware of this, and they are therefore throttling the AH. Essentially you and your AH addons are limited in how quickly you can do stuff on the auction house. The servers are obviously extremely active at the moment and Blizzard will have to limit the AH speed unless they want the entire servers to slow down. This is why they have swapped the MoP realms over to the new AH architecture already.
When will it go away?
The AH will likely be slow for the foreseeable future. Essentially as long as activity is high. Once player activity dies down a bit the AH will get faster, but for the foreseeable future it will remain slow. I would expect at least 3-4 weeks of roughly this speed before we see more “normal” speeds.
Dealing with it
I have some practical tips to deal with it. When you are buying with TSM make sure you only search for one material at the time and stop the scan as soon as the first page is scanned. Then you want to buy out any auctions you can before rescanning or going to the next material.
For selling there isnt much to do, you will just have to live with really slow post scans. Try to time it with when you are going away from your computer so you waste as little time as possible. You can also use other AH addons like auctionator to post, which is a little faster as they don’t scan the entire AH for the item you want to post before posting.