FPS drop in towns

[oblivionwithdongs]

I've started experiencing a huge FPS drop in towns, like from 40-50 to 10-20, the weird thing is all the mods that I would assume are causing this (populated towns/cities, skybirds/bos) because they add many NPCs aren't the culprit, I've been using them forever and disabling them does nothing to cure it.

Note that this happens both in walled towns and settlements like riverwood

All I can think is I have some script mod that's spamming itself on every NPC, but also weirdly this doesn't seem to happen when I, for instance, come across a group of 10-20 imperials/stormcloaks duking it out on the road, so I have no clue.

Also it's definitely not graphics related, i run a fairly light setup when it comes to graphics mods and disabling my ENB usually gives me an extra 20+ fps but my fps will stay at 10-20 regardless of it being on or not.

Is there some mod that I can install that'll let me see exactly how many scripts are firing, if they're stuck and that sorta thing?

[Just Don't]

Do you use HDT-SMP? If so, do you have it enabled for all/several NPCs? You can try the console command smp reset to see if your performance improves after using it. That would confirm your system is overloaded by SMP. The permanent solution is to configure the smp xml to your own specifications. Or limit the amount of actors with SMP items. 

[oblivionwithdongs]

I've been using SMP on my main character but I'm pretty sure it's not affecting any of the npcs, they're all wearing default armor with no changes other than making them cbbe/bodyslide, and i have had it my whole game and this stuttering has only started recently, will still give the command a try though. I had an issue like this before when I used Realistic SMP but I'm pretty sure I'm just running the default config at the moment.

 

edit: thinking of it i had a problem with the dwemer colosseum due to the number of npcs in the audience, there really must be something that goes haywire when there's too many npcs around