This article addresses an interesting dilemma … the constant
“polling” required by RSS news feed readers. RSS works by having
the “reader” application poll the RSS file to see what new articles, or
items, are present. As described, the RSS reader applications
often use the “top of the hour” as the time for when they fetch the
file to check for new items.
One thing that can be done on the server side is to insert caching
reverse proxies that are designed to scale these types of
requests. When I was working at Novell, we used the BorderManager
product for exactly this type of scaling. It was able to handle
hundreds of thousands of simultaneous TCP connections, and would serve
up the cached content … in this case a simple RSS XML file.
There are some ways that this situation could be improved … but it
would take coordination of the various RSS news reader developers …
and possibly more evolution of the RSS “standard” …