Infoworld: RSS Woes
Chad Dickerson describes some symptons of RSS adoption:
InfoWorld.com now sees a massive surge of RSS newsreader activity at the top of every hour, presumably because most people configure their newsreaders to wake up at that time to pull their feeds. If I didn’t know how RSS worked, I would think we were being slammed by a bunch of zombies sitting on compromised home PCs. Our hourly RSS surge has all the characteristics of a distributed DoS attack, and although the requests are legitimate and small, the sheer number of requests in that short time period creates some aggravating scaling issues.
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Reader Comments
staggering
intraVnews uses a staggered approach. Each feed has it's own schedule which is determined by the feed author, among other things. The effect is that there is no specific time during which all feeds are updated. Instead, updates are spread over the hour and day. This also maintains responsiveness of Outlook at all times and you don't have to wait until the top of the hour for new items to arrive.
I predict that news readers will smarten up eventually, but intraVnews leads the pack ;)
the need for a "shock absorber"
This problem sounds like a good fit for a shock absorber service like Akamai. A service like that could pick up on a feed from a heavily used site - as it changes -and distribute it worldwide the way it does for content.
Take it to the next level and imagine a service like Akamai deciding to add "feedster-like" filters or meta services on top. Rather than deal with static data - these services could leverage the factor of time and change to provide added value.
Technical Gap
Here's a perspective on the cause of IWs woes: RSS clients not use HTTP Conditional Get...
http://www.kbcafe.com/rss/?guid=20040721043921
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