Documentation
How daily ingestion runs
The provider ladder, why every slot sits after 05:00 UTC, and what a disabled provider still does each day.
Last reviewed against the product on .
Every provider this site reads from is invoked on its own schedule, and a daily sweep catches anything that was missed. This page explains the shape of that ladder and two decisions in it that are easy to misread as bugs.
The ladder
Providers are spread across the early morning rather than fired at once, so that a slow source cannot delay the others and so that no single minute carries every request.
- Providers
- 11
- each with exactly one scheduled slot
- Ladder
- 05:05 - 08:05 UTC
- plus a daily sweep at 08:05
- Earliest slot
- 05:00 UTC
- a floor, not a coincidence
Measured from vercel.json and src/lib/ingestion/windows.ts.
Why nothing runs before 05:00 UTC
Vercel cron schedules are UTC and do not observe daylight saving. A slot at 04:05 UTC is 00:05 in Toronto through the summer, but 23:05 the previous day through the winter, which would file five months of observations under the wrong date. Anything at or after 05:00 UTC lands after midnight Eastern in both offsets, so the floor is enforced by a test rather than left to whoever edits the schedule next.
Why a disabled provider still runs
Four sources are currently ingested and two are disabled upstream, and the disabled ones are still invoked every day. That looks wasteful and is not.
One source, the World Bank's real-time food prices, stays disabled for a different reason: its current download requires accepting terms interactively, and this site does not accept terms on anyone's behalf.
Seeing it for yourself
The ingestion schedule page publishes each provider's slot in both Eastern offsets, and coverage shows what actually arrived.