For some reason about a week ago when I started getting a lot of lag when opening Wikipedia articles, which caused the Chrome tab to freeze for a few seconds and the inability to move my mouse. After a bit of troubleshooting, I discovered that it was ArticleInfo gadget, and the lag does not occur when I have it disabled. The lag is so bad infact that I spent 10 minutes trying to edit a page (with 960k bytes) and the Chrome window kept going unresponsive. After disabling the tool I was able to edit the page. What could be causing this lag? It never occurred before. Also, a while ago the gadget said that there was an issue with the API so I wonder if it has something to do with that.
Topic on Talk:XTools
Are you still seeing this issue? Roughly a week ago, we were firing a hook (Special:Diff/6421280) and this could possibly cause some lag, but the issue would then be with whatever is listening to the hook, not the XTools gadget itself. We're no longer firing the hook, but we have plans to reinstate it.
Also roughly a week ago, XTools was experiencing significant performance problems due to an issue with the databases (phab:T361945). This was fixed on April 5.
That said, I don't know why the gadget (with or without the above issues) would cause your entire browser to lag like you describe. There is no infinite loop or anything like that, and it has a very small memory footprint.
Yes, I re-enabled the gadget to find the answer to this question for a few days and the lag has come back.
I now retract my statement. I am still sometimes getting the lag with XTools disabled, but it happens far less frequently.
Yes the lag has now stopped.
I am reopening this because the lag has come back. When I open the article for London, the browser locks up, but does not lock up with XTools disabled.
I am not convinced its the XTools gadget, but I may still be able to help you figure out what's going wrong. Could you follow the steps at w:WP:JSERROR and report back with any findings?