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.

3 of 443 comments (clear)

Are they sure by foidulus · 2004-07-20 07:34 · Score: 0, Troll

they aren't just being /.ed?
Re:Still haven't tried these newfangled RSS reader by cmdr_beeftaco · 2004-07-20 07:54 · Score: 0, Troll

www.google.com
This amazing site gets a number of news feeds but it also empowers you to find your own damn reader.
Re:Can't this be throttled? by Zaiff+Urgulbunger · 2004-07-20 08:16 · Score: 0, Troll

"...a valid RSS feed that contained an error message in-line describing why your request was rejected"

What, like, "Fuck off! Just F-U-C-K O-F-F and take your stupid fuck-wit, fuckity news reader fucking software with you! Fucking Cunt!". Would that be fair?

I do think its important to be *firm* and *unambiguous* with your message!! :-D