Thread:Smgamermat77/@comment-28083312-20170416000228/@comment-31294034-20170416041618

Let me tackle some issues.

Message lag
Message lag occurs when your messages are displayed not only to you but to the other users in chat a considerable amount of time after you sent them. This can occur for any number of reasons, mostly network related.

A lot of the time it is simply because there is something between you and Wikia that is moving sluggishly. Whether it be your router, your ISP, or something beyond there is something that is not doing what it is supposed to at the speed that is desired.

In addition there could be an issue on Wikia's end (though not often). You can usually tell if the issue stems from Wikia because everyone in chat is experiencing the same issues at roughly the same time.

Wikia spreads out the chat rooms over several different servers and even though this is a really good way to handle the staggering amount of network traffic generated by chat it can still sometimes become congested for short periods of time.

Emoticons
Emoticons, as you had suggested, are not pre-loaded. Instead your browser fetches the images from its cache or from Wikia as needed. If an emoticon is not used then it is not fetched.

The benefit of a browser cache is so that the images can be kept on your computer so that the browser doesn't have to constantly fetch images it encounters a lot. This actually speeds up the process of loading and is used heavily throughout the internet.

Scripts
Scripts are often a source of utility and amusement and usually don't have a large impact on the loading times of chat. Scripts are usually quite small and are often cached both by Wikia and your browser so it almost never needs to fetch a new version.

However, scripts can and have been written poorly which can have a negative impact on the chat experience. These issues can usually be easily spotted by reading through the source of the script to pick out things such as: non-terminating loops, poor use of setInterval, and other things like this which are run repeatedly for no real reason other than the author couldn't think of a better way to do it.

Another class of performance issues comes from memory leaks which aren't all that common but are significantly harder to debug. Though, they can be sought out through the browser profiler and a trained eye.

Summary
All in all there are a lot of things that can impact the performance of chat and sometimes there is just nothing you can do but wait it out.