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.

2 of 443 comments (clear)

Re:What about a scheduler? by cmdr_beeftaco · 2004-07-20 07:50 · Score: 5, Funny

Bad idea. Everyone knows that most headlines are made at the top of the hour. Thus, A.M. radio always give news headlines "at-the-top-of-hour." RSS reader should be given the same timely updates.
Related to this is the fact that most traffic accidents happen "on the twenties." Human nature is a curious and seemingly very predictable thing.
Re:Can't this be throttled? by hunterx11 · 2004-07-20 08:52 · Score: 4, Funny

From now on, instead of telling people to fuck off I'll just say:
User-agent: You Disallow: /

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English is easier said than done.