We'll be honest with you — over the past week or so, MovieNight.app hasn't felt as snappy as it should. Pages that used to load instantly were taking their sweet time, and for some of you, "their sweet time" meant staring at a blank screen for ten seconds or more. That's not the experience we want anyone to have, and we've noticed it too.

What was going on

We've been thoroughly working through solutions — not just to patch the symptom, but to understand exactly why it was happening and make sure it stays fixed. After digging through the numbers, we traced the slowdown to a couple of behind-the-scenes jobs that keep MovieNight running.

Here's the short version: every time you visit a movie page, we quietly make a note of it. That's how features like "recently viewed" and our trending lists stay fresh. The problem? One piece of the site was re-crunching that entire history — every visit, ever — on every single page load. On top of that, an internal stats job was re-scanning our full movie catalog every minute of every day, just to update a dashboard almost nobody was looking at.

Individually, neither of those sounds like much. Together, they had our database running at full sprint around the clock — and every page you loaded had to wait in line behind it.

What we did about it

We reworked both. The visit history now gets summarized once and reused, instead of being recalculated for every visitor. The stats job got smarter about how it counts and now checks in every fifteen minutes instead of sixty times an hour. And we added some tuning under the hood so the database can answer these questions without breaking a sweat.

The result: pages that were taking 10+ seconds are now loading in a fraction of a second. Not "a bit better" — genuinely fast, the way it should have been all along.

What's next

This builds on the database move we told you about last week — new hardware plus smarter software. We're also putting better monitoring in place so if anything starts dragging again, we'll know before you do.

Thanks for sticking with us while we sorted this out. If you ever notice the site feeling slow, we genuinely want to hear about it — that kind of feedback helps us catch things early. Now go find something to watch tonight. It'll only take a second to load.