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

[David Czarnecki <david@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Not that it solves the larger issues addressed in the following posts, but
they're also not sending compressed content (GZIP'd for example). That was
surprising as it directly affects total bandwidth. 

-David

Quoting Bob Wyman <bobwyman@xxxxxxxxxx>:

> 
> 	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
> 
>