mod/turnitintool/settings.php is included for all site administrators when building the Settings Nav.

This settings page includes a call to turnitintool_updateavailable() which in turn fetches a page from the turnitin website.

We're finding that this call takes around about .8 seconds which means that any of our administrators have all page load times increased by this amount.
Additionally, should the TII website fail, our page loads will not complete until the doRequest timeout expires - which has a setting of 240 seconds (4 minutes).

We'd really appreciate it if you could move this behaviour to cron as it's more than tripling most of our page load speeds.

Seen on turnitintool version 2012060801