Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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.

2 of 443 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Simple HTTP Solution by skraps · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This "optimization" will not have any long-lasting benefits. There are at least three variables in this equation:

    1. Number of users
    2. Number of RSS feeds
    3. Size of each request

    This optimization only addresses #3, which is the least likely to grow as time goes on.

    --
    Karma: -2147483648 (Mostly affected by integer overflow)
  2. Re:RSS needs better TCP stacks by Salamander · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Leaving thousands upon thousands of connections open on the server is a terrible idea no matter how well-implemented the TCP stack is. The real solution is to use some sort of distributed mirroring facility so everyone could connect to a nearby copy of the feed and spread the load. The even better solution would be to distribute asynchronous update notifications as well as data, because polling always sucks. Each client would then get a message saying "xxx has updated, please fetch a copy from your nearest mirror" only when the content changes, providing darn near optimal network efficiency.

    --
    Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.