[horde] Huge Weather.com Portal Delays - cache?

[Aaron Mahler]

  Hello!

   I noticed tonight that there were periods of time where our system 
couldn't get the current weather from weather.com for the Horde portal 
blocks. During these instances, a timeout apparently comes into play 
that makes the user login taken a long, long time (like minutes, it 
seems) before finally rendering the page with an error in the box about 
unavailability or somesuch.

   This was intermittent and I'm not sure what was causing the 
problems... maybe weather.com being briefly constipated. Who knows.

   Whatever the case, I've removed that portal block for the moment. 
Users who have it embedded in their prefs will just see an error in that 
box. I changed the global config for users who haven't written a custom 
set of prefs to the database so that it is not part of their layout.

   Is there a way I can avoid this? I'd like to either reduce the 
timeout substantially or find some way to cache the data. It wouldn't 
hurt if it  was a little out of date. What is hurting, though, are the 
users getting hung for minutes on end, especially with the fairly heavy 
use our system gets.

Any help would be appreciated!
  - Aaron
Sweet Briar College
Sweet Briar, Va


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