diff --git a/airtime_mvc/application/common/PodcastManager.php b/airtime_mvc/application/common/PodcastManager.php
index 29a68699c..095c8ffc7 100644
--- a/airtime_mvc/application/common/PodcastManager.php
+++ b/airtime_mvc/application/common/PodcastManager.php
@@ -30,7 +30,12 @@ class PodcastManager {
         $service = new Application_Service_PodcastEpisodeService();
         foreach ($autoIngestPodcasts as $podcast) {
             $episodes = static::_findUningestedEpisodes($podcast, $service);
-            $podcast->setDbAutoIngestTimestamp(gmdate('r'))->save();
+            // Since episodes don't have to be uploaded with a time (H:i:s) component,
+            // store the timestamp of the most recent (first pushed to the array) episode
+            // that we're ingesting.
+            // Note that this folds to the failure case (Celery task timeout/download failure)
+            //  but will at least continue to ingest new episodes.
+            $podcast->setDbAutoIngestTimestamp(gmdate('r', strtotime($episodes[0]->getDbPublicationDate())))->save();
             $service->downloadEpisodes($episodes);
         }
 
diff --git a/airtime_mvc/application/controllers/plugins/PageLayoutInitPlugin.php b/airtime_mvc/application/controllers/plugins/PageLayoutInitPlugin.php
index 5934b152b..39c8e2c90 100644
--- a/airtime_mvc/application/controllers/plugins/PageLayoutInitPlugin.php
+++ b/airtime_mvc/application/controllers/plugins/PageLayoutInitPlugin.php
@@ -55,23 +55,22 @@ class PageLayoutInitPlugin extends Zend_Controller_Plugin_Abstract
             $this->_initViewHelpers();
         }
 
-        // Piggyback the TaskManager onto API calls
-        if ($controller == "api") {
-            $this->_initTasks();
-        }
-    }
-
-    /**
-     * If we're not running unit tests, run the TaskManager tasks on each request
-     */
-    protected function _initTasks() {
-        /* We need to wrap this here so that we aren't checking when we're running the unit test suite
-         */
+        // Skip upgrades and task management when running unit tests
         if (getenv("AIRTIME_UNIT_TEST") != 1) {
             $taskManager = TaskManager::getInstance();
-            $taskManager->runTask(TaskFactory::UPGRADE);  // Run the upgrade on each request (if it needs to be run)
-            //This will do the upgrade too if it's needed...
-            $taskManager->runTasks();
+
+            // Run the upgrade on each request (if it needs to be run)
+            // We can't afford to wait 7 minutes to run an upgrade: users could
+            // have several minutes of database errors while waiting for a
+            // schema change upgrade to happen after a deployment
+            $taskManager->runTask(TaskFactory::UPGRADE);
+
+            // Piggyback the TaskManager onto API calls. This provides guaranteed consistency
+            // (there is at least one API call made from pypo to Airtime every 7 minutes) and
+            // greatly reduces the chances of lock contention on cc_pref while the TaskManager runs
+            if ($controller == "api") {
+                $taskManager->runTasks();
+            }
         }
     }