RSS Scalability

Dare Obasanjo does a great job of illuminating the issues behind the misconception that RSS has, or can have, a scalability issue. ‘RSS scalability’ should only be an issue for you if you insist on publishing your syndication feeds dynamically on each request, bypassing the bandwidth savings of having your web server return a 304 Not Modified response for a static xml file. Wired covered similar terrain in April this year. Having aggregators pounding your site was a concern a couple of years ago, when many of them didn’t support 304 responses from web servers, but it shouldn’t be a problem now, unless you’re not serving RSS in a way that allows you to conserve bandwidth.

Of course web based aggregators offer the advantage of only needing to request a feed once for thousands of clients, saving even more bandwidth.
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