I was wondering how many people out there are coding using the Bulk API, and what your experiences have been... For me it's been a bit frustrating.  Batch processing is very inconsistent and (seemingly) temperamental.  The strangest of all has been the mysterious hangs of batches.  For example, right now I have a job currently consisting of four batches, each of 5000 Opportunity records.  The first three required between 3 and 4 minutes to process, while the fourth has been running now for five hours, but still says "In Progress" (and not timed out, etc. as you might expect), with 3700 complete.  The Processing Time information shows values below those of the prior three batches, so I know it's not actually doing anything, or having some type of trigger cascade, or whatever.  It's just sitting there...  Is there any way to get it running again?

I'd really like to rely on this feature for our data migration, but these runtime issues are pretty painful.

In addition, during deletes I sometimes will get an "unexpected error, contact support" message from a batch.  See case 03853809.

If anyone has advice or best practices for dealing with this I would be grateful to hear them.  FWIW I'm running from Perl via WWW::Salesforce::Simple and REST::Client, but this seems to be a server side issue.

Regards,

Jeff