There have been various problems which cause the akamai timeout
situation. And engineering has been working on the issues so, in
general, you should be seeing fewer of them and optimistically none at
all. "the akamai timeout" may be the result of hardware or software
issues or a combination of same either at akamai or at SC. Akamai has
been responsive when we have opened tickets with them.


On the SC side -- we have made some hardware changes and upgrades and
the SC code base is regularly updated. The amount of spam that the
system has been handling has been increasing steadily and, of course,
that has put a strain on both the hardware and software; sometimes in
unanticipated ways. It's an ongoing process and also frustrating to
track down the cause a lot of the time, because a number of things have
to happen together at exactly the wrong time to cause the timeout and
recreating that to be able to ensure that all the causes have been found
tends to be impossible. So it is not as simple as a light bulb burns out
and when it is replaced then the akamai timeout goes away forever.

The amount of spam that the
system has been handling has been increasing steadily and, of course,
that has put a strain on both the hardware and software; sometimes in
unanticipated ways. It's an ongoing process and also frustrating to
track down the cause a lot of the time, because a number of things have
to happen together at exactly the wrong time to cause the timeout and
recreating that to be able to ensure that all the causes have been found
tends to be impossible