Once you have created your river and set up the channels where to get drops from, your river should start populating almost instantaneously i.e. after a few seconds. This however only applies to our hosted service - https://swiftapp.com

For self-hosted deployments, the cron schedule is as follows:

• Content crawlers (for fetching news feeds, email, tweets and what not) run every 30 minutes
• Metadata extractors (to pull out semantic tags, images and URLs from drops) run every 15 minutes

Therefore, for a new installation and freshly created river, it will take about 30-35 minutes before your river starts filling up.

NOTE: The rate at which drops start appearing in your river is also dependent on other factors (outside the control of the application) e.g.

• Bandwidth on your Internet connection
• Rate limiting by third party services e.g. Twitter or even your ISP!
• Configuration of the channels in your river. For example, if you would only like to see drops that bear certain keywords or phrases, it may be a while before the background processes find a match and deliver the drop to your river.