Slowdowns - one data point

I solved one of those mysterious slowdowns that afflict some owners. I have a fairly small network, not many apps or rules. Mostly motion sensors and light switches. A couple of days ago it got slow - 2 or 3 seconds from motion to lighting. And over that next few days it stretched to 5 or even 8 seconds. Web page access was slow. The delays were visible in the log. But no errors or obviously misbehaving device or app. On a hunch I reboot my mac mini - not the hub. Things cleared up quickly and its back to sub-second response.

I have a Mac Mini with Firefox and 3 or 4 tabs open to HE. 24x7. I also have an Ubuntu box, also Firefox with 4 HE tabs open, 24x7. Like the title says, It's just one data point but it might help the search for resource constraints.

I emailed support a couple weeks ago with a similar data point.
My setup was simpler, but possibly "artificially" caused or at least not entirely normal use.

In my case I had only 2 HE tabs open. 1 was just on the devices pages, and was only used to periodically refresh to check on slowness.
The 2nd tab (and I think this one is the culprit) was on a dashboard.

This is on a laptop that I put to sleep every night (the "artificial" part) - which obviously causes the network to cut in and out and wreaks havoc on the JavaScript. But over time, ~a week or so, trying to refresh the first tab would eventually get stuck. Chrome gives me a status of "waiting for an available socket".
Then the moment I refresh or close the dashboard tab, the 1st tab almost immediately loads.

If long living sockets is the issue, I should also mention I have 18 MQTT 'devices' each with their own connection.