Aaarrghhh

That about sums up the day. The nightly post is horribly delayed, due to - as we now know after much hair pulling, teeth gnashing and cursing - due to a bug in a core programming API used by FeedBlitz. Basically, there are apparently situations where this otherwise reliable and important to FeedBlitz API causes the server's CPU to go into an infinite loop. We, unfortunately, hit one of those situations today, where a relatively badly behaved web server tripped the situation that caused the race condition. Infinite loop, process doesn't end (that would be the infinite part), no emails. Just our bad luck and, for what it's worth, a total, utter pain to identify and fix (because even once we found the true cause and some documentation on it, the workaround in the tech note doesn't. actually. work. either. Phooey.).

But fix it we have, and the poll is off and running again. This time it will finish. As much as we strive for consistency in performance, the more feeds we see the more likely one or two will eventually throw a wrench in the works (see my remarks here). So it was today, and while do apologize for the inconvenience, we've bounced back and are ready to blitz those feeds once more.