Recently, I was writing a small script to scrape data from the blockchain, and it kept "hanging" every few minutes. At first, I thought it was my network acting up... Later, I checked the logs and found that most of the delays were caused by the indexer/subgraph rebuilding or lagging, and RPC was also rate-limiting me, returning a 429, which instantly woke me up: what I thought was "real-time" was actually multiple layers of caching and queuing.

So, who is actually slowing me down?
Probably not the chain itself, but my competition for the shared RPC queue.

This also makes me think of the recent social mining and fan token schemes—"attention as mining." Honestly, attention also relies on a bunch of infrastructure feeding data, and when the data shakes, it all turns into refresh button mining... Anyway, my current approach is: for critical queries, run a lightweight node or buy a stable RPC; for non-critical ones, accept the slower response and don't fight the latency.