The TickSpout is only emitting ticks in nextTuple() which means it's very likely the ticks could get out of sync.

[cjnolet]

A better option would be to have a TimerTask running that is emitting tuples directly instead of using nextTuple(). This would guarantee tick tuples are always prioritized. It's possible it could cause issues in cases where there is significant back-pressure... but we'll need to verify this through some stress tests.