User blog comment:Sean Colombo/Custom Emoticons Available in Chat/@comment-1393830-20110914215049/@comment-1491391-20110914222712

Hi there, Fortunately, the size of emoticons shouldn't affect server load at all (it's all the same to the server - it doesn't resize the emoticons, your browser takes care of that for you). However, if there are images larger than 19x19, then the first time that a user sees that image, the image may take slightly longer to download (and then the browser caches it for future requests).

The slowdown does suck though. We're not sure yet what the cause is, but we've deployed a change at 3:05pm PST (20 minutes ago) which we're hoping fixes it. If not, then there is one change we can do to assure that the change is unrelated to Emoticons (that change is: rewriting it so that all of the work is done client-side).

Regardless of what the fix ends up being, we're keeping a close eye on it and hope to have things back up to fullspeed pronto.

Thanks for the feedback :)