I HATE this, but it's now just plain broken, and no one's going to fix it (or accept a fix for it).

Some socket fixes are in here...let's make sure we're getting them.

We're getting an extra in prod...need to figure out what it is. I'm betting a heartbeat in there.

only flush if write was successful; if it throws when writing, make sure that items in a transaction are aborted

First pass, and we almost certainly want to rip this out, but getting some sanity numbers on Ubuntu before going further.