Question Huge fps drop with UnityWebRequest.GetTexture

Hi all,
I'm not building a multiplayer system or anything, but I figured this will be the best place to ask around in.

I have a few menus that use UnityWebRequest.GetTexture and UnityWebRequest quite often, to download images and text from a server (that currently runs locally). I've noticed a really big FPS drop when I call UnityWebRequest.GetTexture. Its basically a good 1-2 second screen freeze (depending on the image size).

The flow is that a System.URIi is created from a url string -> WebRequest is sent -> a texture's returned -> A sprite is created from that texture -> that sprite's assigned to an image container.

I don't mind not having an image until it finishes loading, but I just don't want my game to freeze.

I'm guessing the drop might actually happen when I create the sprite and not when the request is sent/returned, but either way I'm not so sure how could I optimize it.
Anyone knows any good practice for this flow? Or at least what am I doing wrong?

BTW, I have an amd R9 5900x and an R9 290 GPU with 16Gb 3600mhz ram

Thanks!