In the past you may have experienced slow response times for historical (any flight but the last) flight webpages containing a map, and tracklog pages, for flights shown by tail number or flight number.
Our big software rollout last month was intended to address this issue, among many, and although the infrastructure was put in place, it remained dormant until we could push out the software to expose the new API and to update the mapservers and the tracklog page to use it.
The map speedups went in on Friday and the tracklog speedups went in late Sunday night.
The result is that when pulling up historical flights flown within the last three weeks or so, the number of disk accesses the database has to do to retrieve the track (according to the query planner) has been reduced by 99%. Only five track logs in the last eleven hours have taken the database more than 1/4th of a second to retrieve, compared to as much as 30 seconds in the past.
If you retrieve a map or tracklog for a flight more than a few weeks in the past, it will still be obtained in the previous manner. Eventually all historical maps and tracklogs will be updated so they can work in the more efficient manner.