Re: blogs.msdn.com: RSS consumes too much bandwidth

[Walter Underwood <wunder@xxxxxxxxxx>]

--On Wednesday, September 08, 2004 01:43:46 PM -0400 Bob Wyman 
<bobwyman@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 	My hope is that in the process of defining Atom, we'll be able to
> address the bandwidth issue better than it has been addressed in the past.
> There a number of things we can consider. One of them is getting people to
> use push instead of pull (ala: "Atom over XMPP"[2,3]). There must be other
> approaches we can use as well...
> 	What can we do to ensure that Atom doesn't get swamped by bandwidth
> problems?

The preferred approach would be to not invent anything new, and use existing
HTTP mechanisms.

1. Use GET and POST in a cache-friendly way. Always a GET for cachable
information fetches, POST for modification.

2. Encourage If-modified-since on requests and 304 (not modified) in
responses.

3. Use caching hints, like Expires, in responses and pay attention
to them in clients.

wunder
--
Walter Underwood
Principal Architect
Verity Ultraseek