Lockergnome’s RSS Resource: Adam Kalsey is writing a series over at LockerGnome’s RSS site about optimizing RSS feeds. He makes this good point:
“Since most people read feeds through an aggregator or some sort, feed requests are typically made in an automated fashion by software, whether the feed has been updated or not. Some aggregators check your feed every 15 minutes. For the average 15kb feed, this translates to 1.44 MB of bandwidth every day, and that’s just from one person subscribing to the feed.”
I had never considered how much bandwidth could go out the window. This is a fundamental problem of the polling architecture of RSS — you just keep checking and checking, regardless of what has changed (or not, most likely). I gotta find out how much bandwidth this feed is using.
I calculated it: over the last week, hits to my RSS feed comprise 6MB or so per day.
