Never thought about winning a major as a way to discover problems like this but...
I've noticed some degradation in BotB performance today, and soon realized the cause lies in the animated thumbnail of my entry. It looks like it's loading in its entirety, full res, then it gets downscaled "in realtime". This is really inefficient imo, and not only it wastes the bandwitdh, but also makes navigating the whole site rather sluggish experience, since it reloads everything again and again with every refresh/changing subpage.
My suggestion is to render thumbnailed versions ahead of time, and directly use them wherever needed. Or maybe even cut the animations to first frame only? I'm also curious what other BotBrs think, and if they experienced the slowdowns too.

Ye it's been slow as ass for me as well

If entries are cached, that'd help by only loading it once.
Also downscaling via size but keeping the full resolution is good imo. It allows mobile devices and high density displays to view images without any upscaling blur.

normally yes, but midori's cover art is 7.4 MiB. you could convert that to a ~100 KiB JPEG and serve that as the thumbnail without any visible loss of quality.

wtf i had no idea there wasn't a smaller cap on cover arts
i thought it was around 666 or 750kb
probably best way is to change the header on cover art so it's cached by the browser

Generating thumbnail previews is additional dev work, but IMO something worth doing.