You may have noticed in the last few days that there is more time between when you click to share something and when the work is completed.  Maybe you even got a little worried about it.  So I thought I’d provide a little explanation by way of an inside peek at what happens under the hood of the Share button.

Every time a member clicks to share something, we create a ‘work order’ for that bookmark and put it into a work processing queue, which is basically just a big list of all the bookmarks we have to process.  Every couple minutes we go looking for work to do, and if we find any, we pull the top few out and start kicking them out to the bookmarking sites.

Depending on how many work orders are in that queue, it could take a while for us to get around to one near the bottom of the list.  But that’s ok – there’s no reason that the bookmarks need to be posted right when the button gets clicked, and it was never intended to do so.  Up until recently, it usually happened pretty quickly anyway, but as the number of users on the system scales up, that near-real-time result is less and less likely to happen.

Don’t worry though, once a bookmark has gone into the work queue it will be processed, even if it’s not right away.