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When RSS Traffic Looks Like a DDoS

Posted by ryuzaki0 on 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.

1 of 443 comments (clear)

  1. Over the years? How about over the weekend? by Marxist+Hacker+42 · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    And it seems to have gotten worse since the new code was installed- I get 503 errors at the top of every hour now on slashdot.

    --
    SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.