When Chrome starts up, after a few seconds it does a HTTP HEAD to three randomly named hosts. Example:

http://bwviimixir/
http://xqtxnqkylt/
http://nrzbkbzwyl/

Video of this monitored with Charles here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjiN5_lyka8

The first few seconds looks bad because of the encoding.

Any idea why it does this?

Looks like this only happens with Chrome on the Mac. My only guess is that it's trying to test for how Chrome handles when you type a bad URL in the address bar. It might do it three times just in generates a valid host name any of the times. Feels like a hack.