Last modified: 2013-06-18 16:37:13 UTC
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Special:ContributionHistory currently relies on a cron job to update every fifteen minutes. This is annoying because it makes having a live feed of donor comments much harder and it makes it impossible to show donors their comments live. Special:ContributionHistory should update more regularly (preferably instantly).
The cron job pulls the completed transactions from ActiveMQ into CiviCRM. Special:ContributionHistory piggybacks on this process to get its donor comments. The reason the process isn't instant is because transactions often take several minutes to actually clear, especially with PayPal. One option would be to lower the time on the cron job and make sure this doesn't break anything. Arthur would be able to comment on this further. Another option would be to create a totally separate process for collecting the comments for Special:ContributionHistory, so that they didn't wait for the payments to actually be cleared. This would introduce a potential spamming vector, however.
The cron has been lowered to 5 minutes for the time being. I added a note to http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Special:ContributionHistory/en to that effect. Also, I changed the header to say "Donor comments from around the world" instead of "Real-time donor comments from around the world" so we aren't lying. It'll change with the next deploy to foundation wiki. We're going to discuss tuning the cron and queue consumption tomorrow, so we may be lowering it further.
The original component this was filed under was wrong - moving to ContributionReporting.
And in actuality, ContributionHistory is no longer used. Marking wontfix.
