I found a way to work around this issue, though I am not sure if this is the optimal solution.
Instead of Minidom I have used cElementTree to parse the RSS feed. I process each "item" tag and its children in a seperate task and add these tasks to the task queue.
This has helped me avoid the DeadlineExceededError. I get the "This resource uses a lot of CPU resources" warning though.
Any idea on how to avoid the warning?
A_iyer