When RSS Traffic Looks Like a DDoS

Posted by ryuzaki0 on Tuesday July 20, 2004 @07:32AM from the which-is-most-of-the-time dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Infoworld's CTO Chad Dickerson says he has a love/hate relationship with RSS. He loves the changes to his information production and consumption, but he hates the behavior of some RSS feed readers. Every hour, Infoworld "sees a massive surge of RSS newsreader activity" that "has all the characteristics of a distributed DoS attack." So many requests in such a short period of time are creating scaling issues. " We've seen similiar problems over the years. RSS (or as it should be called, "Speedfeed") is such a useful thing, it's unfortunate that it's ultimately just very stupid.

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Why are we writing polling software in 2004? by skraps · 2004-07-20 07:39 · Score: 1, Flamebait

The guy who came up with the idea for RSS should be sent back to comp. sci. 101. It should have been readily apparent from day 1 that this would be a problem.
Some sort of peer-to-peer event-driven model would be a better match for this problem.

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