In the past couple of weeks, there were two pages of Original Life that didn't update on time, despite being programmed to do so. There was no missing file or anything obviously broken, like that. The comic display page just continued showing the previous page entry. When I checked the software, it showed that the new page had loaded just fine. Re-saving the entry, manually, caused the new comic to finally display as it should. Since it didn't fail consistently, I took some time in noticing it would happen more than once. Turns out there are a lot of scripts set to run on the same machines at around that time (midnight) and it would sometimes cause the update script for my comic to time out. Instead of re-running the script a few minutes later, it just never got back to it. I had to wake up the next day to find out the latest comic never displayed.

The quickest work around was for the friend who handles the server-side things, to reshuffle some of the scheduled scripts, and slightly change the time which the comic is programmed to update. So, from now on, Original Life will update at 00:15 EST, Monday and Friday, instead of 00:00 on the nose. This should clear things up and not have so many things competing for server time. I hope an extra fifteen minutes won't be too much to bear.