LAMP Oil: The RSS Problem


LAMP Oil is a new blog and column, under the auspices of LinuxWorld, is where I’ll be looking at, and hopefully fuelling the fires of, LAMP technology and developers. In the first article I look at something that is going to affect the very site you are reading now; the bandwidth problems of RSS and other syndication systems. Surprisingly, the solution is relatively easy. There has been much talk recently of the problems of RSS and the popularity of the news aggregation solution starting to cause bandwidth problems with certain sites. The number of people subscribing to the various news feeds and selecting arbitrary refresh times for updating their feeds.The problems are caused by two different elements, human and technical. The human element is that the people who subscribe are generally hungry for news. I pick up maybe 1000-1200 items each day from about 200 feeds at intervals ranging from hourly to just once a day. There are others, though, who to get the news the moment it hits the sites and specify update times of as little as 5 minutes between updates.Read more at my LinuxWorld LAMP Oil blog.