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Faster Feeds Using FeedTree Peer-To-Peer

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the instant-gratification-generation dept.

dsandler writes "Researchers at Rice University have just released version 0.7 of FeedTree, a peer-to-peer system for distributing Web feeds faster. Instead of polling feeds independently, FeedTree users cooperate to share news updates using multicast in Pastry, a scalable p2p overlay network. FeedTree reduces the update delay for existing RSS and Atom feeds to a few minutes without putting extra stress on the webserver (anyone who's ever been temporarily banned by Slashdot's RSS feed knows this is a real concern). Feed publishers can also choose to push digitally signed updates for immediate, tamper-proof delivery to subscribers. The client software (download) runs on Linux, OS X, and Windows, and works with any desktop feed reader."

3 of 109 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Why? by idonthack · · Score: 4, Informative

    It's not "just another p2p", it's a p2p specifically for distributing newsfeeds. Bittorrent doesn't really work to well for that because it doesn't have the infrastructure and downloading the real feed would be easier than downloading the torrent first. This software bypasses any user interaction and grabs it off its established network.

    --
    Why is it that when you believe something it's an opinion, but when I believe something it's a manifesto?
  2. Already getting hit by Shrook by Refried+Beans · · Score: 3, Informative

    I remember seeing something like this in my logs over a year ago. I would see lines like this in my access log:

    66.177.198.139 - Anonymous [04/Apr/2005:03:04:17 -0500] "GET /rdf10_xml HTTP/1.1" 200 5322 "" "Shrook/76p (Distributed; +http://www.fondantfancies.com/shrook/distfaq.php) "

    I haven't seen a hit from this in a while, perhaps that effort didn't gain much traction. Who knows if this one will... I never saw Shrook mentioned on Slashdot.

  3. Rice made Pastry, too. by xiphoris · · Score: 3, Informative

    As a Rice Computer Science student I would like to point out that Pastry actually originated at Rice, under Dan Sandler. The first framework was in Java. You can see from his web page that he's responsible for FeedTree, too.

    Microsoft Research became interested in the product and ported it to C#, effectively turning it into the form it is now. Many classes at Rice have now "backported" it, I guess you could say, and it's used for many of our classes that involve distributed networks, such as the current COMP 410 class which has previously turned out distributed file and process system codename Voltron.

    Here's a link to the paper co-authored by Sandler and others at Rice.