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

["jt" <jt@xxxxxx>]

Again, poking head in here for a sec where it probably doesn't belong.

Perhaps The Scobleizer would care to reflect on the number of bytes in a
poll (multiplied by times-polled), versus the number of bytes in full-text
(multiplied by times-resent) versus bytes on a typical web-page (multiplied
by times refreshed, absent a decent caching mechanism)?!?  I doubt it, or he
wouldn't-a posted what he did.  Besides that, doing the math, a polling
factor of once a day is roughly 100 times better than a polling factor of
every-15-minutes-for-those-with-blog-induced-ADD.

I would also suggest the 5250 paradigm, sending precisely
only-bytes-changed, would be worth a look.  Extremely effective, to use a
word I normally avoid.

I'm also wondering how streaming video is accomplished, considering that
bandwidth??  Moreover, are bandwidth costs any less during off-hours,
because all that stuff (including AV enclosures and WHAT-all) could be
Torrented easily enough 'ahead of time' for those not suffering blog-ADD...
Not technical enough to provide answers, however, in this context.  (I'm
considered something of a lightweight, by some, even in things I know
something about.)  And is XMPP decidedly better than SIMPLE, as I have no
idea but have seen mention of both of these possibilities...??

Btw, not withstanding the probably good ideas in Walter Underwood's
follow-up, I would still ask-the-questions/make-the-suggestions in the
second and third paragraphs, above.

| -----Original Message-----
| From: owner-atom-syntax@xxxxxxxxxxxx
| [mailto:owner-atom-syntax@xxxxxxxxxxxx]On Behalf Of Bob Wyman
| Sent: Wednesday, September 08, 2004 1:44 PM
| To: atom-syntax@xxxxxxx
| Subject: blogs.msdn.com: RSS consumes too much bandwidth
|
|
|
| 	Robert Scoble notes on his blog[1] that blogs.msdn.com has started
| to feed abbreviated entries in order to reduce their bandwidth
| costs. Scoble
| notes: "It's not scalable when 10s of thousands of people start
| subscribing
| to thousands of separate RSS feeds and start pulling down those
| feeds every
| few minutes." He says: "Bandwidth usage was growing faster than MSDN's
| ability to pay for, or keep up with, the bandwidth. Terrabytes of
| bandwidth
| were being used up by RSS." Also: "RSS is losing some of its advantages.
| More and more sites are not providing full-text feeds."
| 	This is, of course, not just an issue for RSS. It is an issue for
| Atom as well. While polling for RSS/Atom files has been an acceptable
| solution to-date, as the popularity of RSS/Atom increases, we're going to
| see more and more people with popular feeds get hit with serious bandwidth
| bills. Scoble says that this problem isn't just one felt by Microsoft. He
| reports, "I know of a major broadcaster that refuses to turn on RSS feeds
| because of this issue too."
| 	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?
|
| 		bob wyman
|
|
|
| [1] http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/2004/09/08.html#a8195
| [2] http://pubsub.com/developers.php
| [3]
| http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-saintandre-atompub-notify-01.txt
|
|