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)
Because there are so many emotes that don't actually get used, that end up there because someone once thought "hmm I think I'll put that as an emote". This is not merely a problem with loading thumbnails, but with the idea of using them as a means of communication in general.
I'd love to see a list of how much each emote has been used, and especially which ones have been used less than 10 times.
Lol @ the suspicion that "you must have more than 16 GB of RAM to use this webb sight" tho
Didnt read allat, the emote library is the crown jewel of this site, this shit turned slow overnight.
One of you nerds did something, I know it, I need it fixed stat
it's been laggy as shit for years, if it suddenly got worse recently i can't say i noticed
edit: i have noticed comments taking longer to go through after hitting send though, that's been happening for just a couple months i think. different issue but possibly related by the timeframe
if they contain an emote they are slow, might be some image fetching mechanism
I thought it was laggy on my phone and it is but actually what it was doing was loading the emoji picker way down the screen if i started typing characters too fast after the :
I'd been dealing with it by starting over and typing slowly which would have it appear in my view but now it's just like oh i guess i just have to scroll down
Love that idea.
Well comrade 9to5 has 32GB RAM and doesn't have this problem. Coincidence?
I didn't verify this with technology, but feels to me like you use almost your entire rate limit on the first page before it's possible to search anything, them if you don't find anything on your first search, nothing else bothers to load if it's not already loaded or cached. Hard to say it's for sure rate limit, but doesn't feel like a problem of slow device to me. Maybe the emoji menu should implement pagination? And/Or exclude emojis from rate limit?
I disagree, the emoji are amazing, especially the obscure ones. I think this can probably be solved with a technical solution, like @makotech222@hexbear.net implemented.
Someone give me a dump of the comments from the database.
if I could load all the emotes, maybe I'd try more of them lol