I can see the issue this is actually not network related.
I fixed it per:
https://github.com/discourse/discourse/commit/911f898a2344d2689cc2913f37c836875f73cc7d
What was happening is that Chrome likes “deferring” timers if they start taking too long.
- We were batching “loading” up emojis
- At some point chrome detected that our batches were taking more than 16ms
- Chrome gets angry and says “no setTimer for you for 3 seconds or more”
This is an internal issue in Chrome we need to report to them, but in the meantime I amended it so we use animation frames which are designed with this in mind.