Have reached qovium age, frame rate is now measurable in seconds per frame and it seems to be dragging the rest of the browser down.
one thing that might help is to spread some of the heavier loops over multiple frames.
by limiting the number of iterations of a loop that are allowed to run per frame you should be able to keep frame rate at a somewhat acceptable level. (while this doesn't speed up the market checking, I think the slowdown could be passed off as a natural trade-off to being an advanced civilization)