UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/51.0.2704.103 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce the problem:
1. Populate a large (2000) dropdown at load.
2. Using javascript, console log (with time stamps) and then use $(#item).html("") to empty the dropdown.
3. Do another console log, and repopulate the dropdown, and console log again.

What is the expected behavior?
The time to empty the drop down is nearly half a second on large lists, but it can repopulate the same amount in a tenth of the time.

What went wrong?
The call to remove html seems to be extremely slow.  We tried using the jquery html function, but also the javascript innerHTML and javascript options.length.  All are slow to remove options from a dropdown.

Did this work before? Yes 4 months ago

Chrome version: 51.0.2704.103  Channel: stable
OS Version: 6.1 (Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2)
Flash Version: Shockwave Flash 22.0 r0

We only tested with a dropdown, but could impact other uses.