Is RSS Doomed by Popularity?

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday December 8, 2004 @12:55PM from the more-than-you-can-chew dept.

Ketchup_blade writes "As RSS is becoming more known to the mainstream users and press, the bandwidth issue reported by many sites (Eweek, CNet, InternetNews) related to feeds is becoming a reality. Stats from sites like Boing Boing are showing a real concern regarding feeds bandwidth usage. Possible solutions to this problem are emerging slowly, like RSScache (feed caching proxy) and KnowNow (even-driven syndication). RSScache seems to offer a realistic solution to the problem, but can this be enough to help RSS as it reaches an even bigger user base in the upcoming year?"

1 of 351 comments (clear)

Min score:

Reason:

Sort:

Limit download to new content by zoips · 2004-12-08 13:04 · Score: 5, Interesting

Instead of downloading the entire RSS feed every time, why not have aggregators indicate to the server the timestamp of the last time the RSS feed was downloaded, or the timestamp of the last item in the feed the aggregator knows about, and then the server can dynamically generate the RSS with only new content for that client. Increases processing load while reducing bandwidth, but processing time is what most servers have lots of, not to mention it's far cheaper to increase than bandwidth.