Everyone, over the past several weeks some users may have experienced 'timeout' issues when using the optimizer. This showed up in a number of contest entries and is why we delayed the contest results until the problem was understood and a fix put in place. Yesterday we put in place a systemwide fix. If you had been experiencing timeouts recently, you may want to retry those algos and see if they now perform better.
Not all optimizer calls were impacted. Under the covers, the optimizer actually chooses from several 'solvers' when trying do its optimization. It turned out that one of these solvers wasn't actually getting loaded. If the optimizer tried to use this solver it would just wait (and timeout).
Sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused.