Particularly the chatterbox clients are a much lighter load than chatting by constantly refreshing which requires a multitude of things to be done to build a page. There are five cblast35 mirrors if I'm not mistaken, and they poll the ticker only once every couple of minutes, so they definitely cause the least extra load of anything, far less of it even than anyone casually browsing the site. The newest nodes ticker similarly is very likely to be causing less load than visiting Newest Nodes - not to mention most clients for it make use of threading information in some way or other, allowing you to avoid a separate visit to notes posted in response to a new subthread you can read all at once.

Makeshifts last the longest.