I am glad there is all that discussion anyway (thanks for your answer Rad and others). I hope there is a technical solution to potential issues of load. I am convinced that at least right now, for journalists and documentation experts, syndicating is getting a major issue and I am glad we participate to that evolution.
Rad Geek wrote:
On Sat, 29 May 2004 16:45:44 +0200, Anthere anthere9@yahoo.com wrote:
. . .
On fr; there is now both RSS and Atom...
Is that risky in terms of load ?
Probably not just *yet*, but it could become risky *soon*, and it's hard to predict just how quickly it will.
The problem is that the way feeds are delivered right now is by polling with an HTTP GET according to an interval set by the newsreader. The way that this is implemented, in every newsreader that's available right now, so far as I know, is by using a fixed interval, which usually defaults to somewhere between 5 and 15 minutes, and which the user can manually set to something else (so that, for example, they're not wasting cycles checking in on a site that never updates more than once daily). Of course, most users *don't* bother to change the interval, so most feed readers end up polling your site every 5-15 minutes.
This isn't a big deal if you've got relatively few visitors--particularly if the server is set up to just send a 304 if there have been no modifications. But it doesn't scale very well at all: in terms of load, it's not much different form having one user press the "Reload" button every few minutes to see whether there have been any changes. As RSS and Atom syndication become more ubiquitous, and feed readers become more popular, more and more users are going to want to use services like this on highly trafficked sites such as WikiPedia. So there's a distinct risk that the current model won't be sustainable for very much longer.
-C