When a remote RSS feed (in the remote RSS feed block) becomes unavailable for whatever reason, loading the page that features the block may take minutes as Moodle (curl) seems to wait for a timeout. As a result, the error message is displayed at the top of the page (see below).

The cronjob admin/cli/cron.php is started twice per hour.

This phenomenon appeared first with Moodle 3.1.

[Output at the top of the page follows]

http://www.twis.org/feed/ Failed with code: cURL Error: Operation timed out after 2000 milliseconds with 224258 bytes received

line 183 of /blocks/rss_client/block_rss_client.php: call to debugging()
line 134 of /blocks/rss_client/block_rss_client.php: call to block_rss_client->get_feed()
line 288 of /blocks/moodleblock.class.php: call to block_rss_client->get_content()
line 230 of /blocks/moodleblock.class.php: call to block_base->formatted_contents()
line 976 of /lib/blocklib.php: call to block_base->get_content_for_output()
line 1028 of /lib/blocklib.php: call to block_manager->create_block_contents()
line 476 of /lib/outputrenderers.php: call to block_manager->ensure_content_created()
line 39 of /theme/bootstrapbase/renderers/core_renderer.php: call to core_renderer->standard_head_html()
line 52 of /theme/clean/layout/columns3.php: call to theme_bootstrapbase_core_renderer->standard_head_html()
line 1028 of /lib/outputrenderers.php: call to include()
line 958 of /lib/outputrenderers.php: call to core_renderer->render_page_layout()
line 244 of /course/view.php: call to core_renderer->header()