This page looks plain and unstyled because you're using a non-standard compliant browser. To see it in its best form, please upgrade to a browser that supports web standards. It's free and painless.

Paul's Time Sink

| Main | Albums |

« | »

RSS, Shrook and Distributed checking

Paul Westbrook | 29 June, 2004 12:55

I have been using a RSS aggregator/reader for about two months, and I really like it. It seems that RSS could be the next way that information is distributed. For example, using a RSS aggregator/reader can be used to get timely news from the different news sources. Also, I can see rss feeds replacing email newsletters. Email newsletters have a problem because the messages may get missed either because people have too many spam messages, or their spam filters are too agressive and filter these news letters. Also rss feeds can help save the bandwidth for a web publisher. The rss xml can be smaller than the formated html for the pages.

Now it seems that rss feeds will be easier for everyone to use. Apple is including a rss reader in their Safari 2.0 for Mac OS X 10.4. So I think that more and more people will be using rss feeds.
This does cause a problem though. Since most aggrigator/readers check for new content on a periodic schedule, and that most people will leave it running, this could cause an increase in the traffic for web servers. For example, if there are 100 people that read the same rss feed, and they have their reader setup to check the feeds every 30 minutes, there will be 200 hits every hour. This could be more traffic than is necessary, especially the content does not get updated all that often. Also this does not scale well at all.

I am currently using Shrook as my rss reader. It has an interesting feature called Distributed Checking. With this feature not all of the clients have to check each rss feed. Only one client has to check the feed for new content, and then notifies the other clients. Here is the text from their faq:

So how does it work?

To oversimplify: A central server maintains a database of when each channel was last updated. To keep it up to date, every so often, the server chooses a computer to check for new items and report back. The frequency of this varies from every 5 minutes for popular channels, to every half hour for channels with only one online subscriber, and it tries to use a different computer each time. At the other end, each copy of Shrook checks in with the server every 5 minutes, and if any of its channels are out of date, it reloads them.

I hope that they will open source this server, and other rss readers will use this.

Computer :: Comment (0) :: Permalink :: Trackbacks (0)

Add comment

Topic

Text

Your name

Your email address

Your personal page (if any)




Powered by LifeType
Design by Book of Styles