You’re right, thanks for reporting!
The intended behavior was to only make one request per user, per full-page load. This means if you have a topic with 1000 posts and 8 participants, there would be 8 requests max. If you went to another topic (without a full-page load) that had the same 8 participants and 2 new participants, there would only be 2 requests.
I think I’ve have a fix to accomplish the intended behavior, but I need to do some more testing. Stay tuned.
PS - The end goal will be to have 0 requests, but there is a limitation with components that prevents this for now.