When RSS Traffic Looks Like a DDoS

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.

Comments

Simple Solution

[prichardson]

Ask RSS reader writers to program into their programs a suggestion that the refresh not be on the hour. It would distribute the load more evenly. Getting people to actually do this is another problem. Sounds to me like a little bit of lazy coding (not checking modified times in header), and a little bit of ignorance (RSS isn't big enough to cause a problem.... so doing this on the hour is OK right?) have just snowballed.

rss+bittorent?

[DougMelvin]

How about combining RSS with Bittorent? The RSS feeder would act more as a BT tracker.. Simply point the client to the nearest dood with a copy of the feed.....

Re:What about a scheduler?

[dogas]

well, I suppose a p2p-like solution could be coded. But of course, that solution would soon be illegal.

Re:Can't this be throttled?

[lukewarmfusion]

And if you want it more than every hour, well then edit the source and compile it yourself "

My newsreader is proprietary, you insensitive clod!