FALSE ALARM, CULPRIT FOUND: I had a MalwareBytes browser extension that slowed the emote picker down. The extension has been purged and now both the popup and the inline picker are working well.
The original post before I did testing
I try to 
in a Hexbear comment. The picture takes forever to even load in the picker so it takes a while to see if I've even selected the right emote. Most of the emotes in the list I can't even see the pictures unless I step away for a minute and come back after they've all loaded. I hit submit comment. It takes forever to post. I can hear the fans whirring. If I'm streaming vid on blorptube while posting something from the emote picker, sometimes the video will just pause and stop loading until whatever process the emotes have kicked off completes. I don't know why some emotes are visible while others aren't it doesn't appear to be related to order that they show up in the list
I think "Well I'm on the ESR of Firefox, maybe it's just old" but then I boot into Linux with cutting-edge up to date Firefox and it still behaves largely the same.
I have wondered if it's an internet speed thing but it seems to behave this way whether I'm on ethernet or 802.11n wireless, whether or not my VPN is on.
It also takes quite some time for emotes to load in the emote picker on Blorp, come to think of it.
I've got 16GB of RAM, that should be plenty. Yes I know the web has gotten more intensive since this computer was made 13 years ago but come on, compared to hell sites like twitter, facebook, and new.reddit, lemmy seems downright lightweight. NoScript and other blockers aren't blocking a ton of bloat here.
I'm not criticizing the unsung heroic devs of Hexbear. I'm no good at web dev, hated it when I had to do it for work, and couldn't fix or optimize this either. But I would like to understand what the root cause of this problem is and
(If the answer is "upgrade your hardware or live with it" then I'm living with it, because my precious little computer is my buddy and I'm not abandoning it)
the problem (on the images side, less familiar with the codebase) is partly an optimization problem with some images that still need to be downsized after the refork. Day-ish of grunt work I haven’t found a slot for?
But yeah, I agree that there's also an issue with quantity in a sense, less raw quantity but more so the accumulation of amount of data you need to load. I've been much more hesitant to do large batches of additions recently and instead have been largely adding emotes on a one by one basis when I do so.
I have to find a time to assess what I can do on my end, unfortunately I have like 50 things going on ATM so
If you can instruct me on what to do, I've got a gamer rig, funemployment time, some crude graphic design experience, and the power of autism available.
It's the least I can do to pay you back for that God of the Dead mega-mix I keep on my pump up playlist.
I would put a salute emoji here, but, well...
@WhyEssEff@hexbear.net @Thordros@hexbear.net
I have some technical knowledge of python, unemployment, and autism, and I'd be interested in helping automate a downsampling procedure if we can come up with good logic for it. The fear I have is just running a 50% down sample on everything without sensible thresholding could break some images.
I was thinking of this recently, and the other thing I noticed is that the emotes reload extremely often for me, even when I use them multiple times a day. Are they not configured to be cached? This might be an issue on my end.