I've got a couple of theory's about what's causing the backup. First, now that we're pinging RSS pinging servers, we're doing it for 12 different servers for each news message. We were building feeds with as many as 200 news items, so a single update would cause 2,400 items to queue in the render queue, each of which would require a network connection. I also modified the render queue to process items at a much higher speed, but that speed may have resulted in less cycles for other work. Let's see what we get if first, we reduce the size of the feed back to a more manageable 20 items.