DevTools disrupted by jQuery calls when bullhorns disabled

When using DevTools in Chrome to experiment with the Lessons UI on an instance of Sakai where the portal bullhorns are disabled, I’m observing a rush of jQuery calls through xhr to fetch bullhornCounts.json every few milliseconds. This activity swamps the CPU where Chrome and DevTools are running, and makes UI development cumbersome.

The attached screenshot depicts a Lessons page in Chrome where rapid calls to fetch bullhornCounts.json is evident in DevTools. So far, I’ve only observed this rapid firing of calls when navigating Lessons or Gradebook NG.

Cursorily, it seems that there’s a bullhorn-related callback mechanism enabled that shouldn’t be when portal.bullhorns.enabled=false.