Is the Award process not-real-time?

Not to be all award-grubby, but there are a couple of awards that I know should be showing up (I hit the criteria for them) on my user page, but haven’t yet. Awards I’ve completed and then gotten seem to take at least an hour or two to show up as “gotten” post-completion. Some haven’t shown up at all?

On the other hand, I’ve seen people get awards within seconds of hitting those criteria?

The lurve system I know is not-quite-real-time but pretty-darn-good. Do the awards just scan every couple of days, and some people got hyper-lucky in their get-timing?