MyTVShows Blog

Some of you may have noticed that MyTVShows was down for most of the weekend. We had to do some maintenance to try and speed up the pages and to optimize our database (which can take a very long time).

After a few days of optimization (those scripts really take a long time) we noticed that the database was running a lot faster

However, we noticed that in some pages it still took a long time to load (and they slowed down the whole site for all users). So, in order to keep the website running smoothly, we decided to temporarily disable the following pages:

• New/Upcoming episodes: to check for new and/or upcoming episodes, please check them individualy for each show (you can see the upcoming episodes on the main show page and the new episodes on the season page, right after the episodes you already have);
• Timelines: we disabled the global timeline, the friends timeline and your timeline;

As you may now, we are working on a complete redesign of MyTVShows. Until we have the new version ready, these pages will stay disabled.

In the new version, the new episodes will be automatically added to your library, so we won’t be needing the new episodes page

If you are a new user, you may be wondering, “why is this site so slow?”.

If you are a regular user you may be asking, “why did MyTVShows become so slow?”.

The answer is simple. In the last weeks we had a major increase of traffic (over 800% more users and 1800% more pageviews than we had before). In less than a week we had and increase of the number of episodes we track from 3 million episodes to 7 million episodes. It took us a year to reach 3 million episodes, and just a week to reach 7 million episodes. At it’s still growing every day

Unfortunately, we weren’t prepared for such an increase of traffic and it all started running (very) slowly. We made a few changes to try and make the site a little faster, and although it helped us keep the site online until now, it clearly isn’t enough.

So we made the decision to rewrite all the code from scratch to increase the overall performance. This process may take some time (we hope it will be complete in a couple of months) and the site may go down a few times (i guess you’ve all seen the “grey screen” a few times) so, please bear with us until we fix everything

We have high expectations for the new version of the website and, when the time is right, we will unveil some important announcements about the future of MyTVShows

Keep tuned in.