Comments on: RSS, Tiger Safari and the Bandwidth Bottleneck

By: Tiger l'osmose

Tiger l'osmose — Tue, 26 Dec 2006 12:38:36 +0000

Yes, Tiger is a really good Os.

By: Mike Steinbaugh

Mike Steinbaugh — Tue, 27 Jun 2006 14:54:54 +0000

I finally switched to Safari RSS but I’ll have to make sure to remove the default RSS feeds :)

By: Tiger l'Osmose

Tiger l'Osmose — Thu, 02 Feb 2006 18:58:09 +0000

Tiger is really a good OS

By: billgates.co.in » Blog Archive » Chanting Om.

billgates.co.in » Blog Archive » Chanting Om. — Mon, 11 Jul 2005 23:42:06 +0000

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By: TP | 2005/06/15 | Whats making noise | Trackb [...]

By: paradox1x

paradox1x — Wed, 04 May 2005 17:34:39 +0000

Safari is TOO good of a RSS reader?

Om Malik: RSS, Tiger Safari and the Bandwidth Bottleneck. In a related note – I need to get a Mac!…

By: The Apple Blog

The Apple Blog — Tue, 03 May 2005 08:15:44 +0000

RSS in the Mainstream, Coping with Rising Bandwidth

Support for RSS in Firefox, then Safari, are mostly encouraging developments to slowly further bring RSS into the mainstream. Both browsers are implementing the concept of “Live Bookmarks”. Bookmarking a site now offers us the ability to not only sav…

By: Phil Boardman

Phil Boardman — Tue, 03 May 2005 07:28:19 +0000

Except if a feed hasn’t changed it will send the appropriate HTTP Response code and you’d only send a few bytes.

By: Adam Zey

Adam Zey — Mon, 02 May 2005 06:10:15 +0000

The RSS bandwidth problem is totally overblown. The problem is people just don’t know how to deal with it. First off, nobody seems to compress their RSS feeds with gzip/deflate, which would save about 80% of the bandwidth usage. It’s part of the HTTP spec.

Second is people don’t know how to get cheap bandwidth. Corporations claim that RSS is costing them enormous sums of money, when amusingly their RSS bandwidth needs could be met with a simple budget dedicated server for $100 to $200 per month; mere pennies for big companies. And if the big servers ($100 gets you abouut 1000GB, $200 gets you 20mbit, or over 6000GB) are too expensive, there are cheaper solutions like low-end servers or virtual private servers that go for under $50/mth.

What does $100/mth get you? Why, only about 200 MILLION RSS downloads per month, more than enough for big corporations (And hey, if they need more, $200 per month is still not breaking the bank for a big corporation).

$100 isn’t too much for bloggers either; since they don’t need nearly that much RSS capability, a bunch of bloggers could share the cost.

Anyhow, that’s my rant. There is no problem with RSS, the problem is with the people using it.

By: Aswath Rao

Aswath Rao — Sun, 01 May 2005 22:10:39 +0000

When FWD RTC Client included my blog to their ISS reader (with 5 minute period), I had to increase my usage. Those who know my blog would set the period to be 24 hours, not even an hour. So the reader should allow for customization at different levels.

Conditional GET solves the problem at one level. But the server gets pinged nonetheless and if randomization is not done, then as you suggested that all these will bunch up together.

By: Sina

Sina — Sun, 01 May 2005 13:46:59 +0000

One million users of the new MAC OS? I love Apple owners’ optimism.

By: Om Malik

Om Malik — Sun, 01 May 2005 05:57:27 +0000

well, i agree. when the article was posted, there was little information about who was going to be included in the list. i think i was most worried about folks like gizmodo and engadget and some of the bigger blogs, but not so big websites.

By: najeeb

najeeb — Sun, 01 May 2005 05:54:33 +0000

granted – I should have read you article correctly. But, I’d assume that the servers which are hit with the default settings would handle such load.

By: Om Malik

Om Malik — Sun, 01 May 2005 05:27:12 +0000

najeeb you are focusing on the bandwidth usage in terms of napster. when that was happening the load was generally distributed across many networks, over many servers. in this case, the rss feeds are being polled from one server, at aregular interval and are going to pose a strain on that server.

By: najeeb

najeeb — Sun, 01 May 2005 05:20:54 +0000

I think, it’s a complete non-issue. RSS feeds are very small in size, and any intelligent client shouldn’t be pulling in the updates every second. It totally depends on the implementation of Safari browser. In any case, in terms of bandwidth usage, I don’t think it is going to come anywehre close to the peak usage of Napster when hundreds of thousands of people were exchanging mp3 files day and night.

By: orque

orque — Sat, 30 Apr 2005 23:34:58 +0000

It seems people are misinformed. Yes, Safari RSS checks feeds periodically (specified in the preferences in Tiger’s Safari), using conditional GET. Yes, Safari RSS shows unread counts (in parentheses after the bookmark name, and by coloring article headers if you have that option turned on). And yes, it aggregates. You just put related feeds in the same folder then you choose “View All RSS Articles”.

By: Om Malik

Om Malik — Sat, 30 Apr 2005 20:50:07 +0000

okay here is the deal silver dragon – if you take a billion drops of water, it become a tank and so on and so forth. get it. because it might seem small it all starts to add up real quick when a lot of of people are accessing the same small file and that small file is traveling to a million pages, the server serving it up gets hit hard and real fast