I've done my fair share of it, and while I don't know that we ultimately tackled it 100%, there were plenty of gotchas. 1) Respect etags / last_updated tags.

I've done my fair share of it, and while I don't know that we ultimately tackled it 100%, there were plenty of gotchas. 1) Respect etags / last_updated tags. This will save you a ton of bandwidth, for one, and keep you from getting banned by the feeds you're pulling. It's important. What I ended up doing was a different method for new feeds vs. ones I already knew about -- on the initial parse (and subsequent ones too), I would check for an etag or last_modified indicator. If I can't detect anything, I set a poll frequency to something like a half an hour. This kept me from slamming servers that didn't properly implement etags, while I could check headers on the ones that did more frequently. 2) Hang on to your sockets. Opening / closing sockets is expensive for this particular task. What ended up working for us was queueing entries and using the same urllib handle for as many as needed polling at a time. Otherwise, we were flooding the box with open sockets. 3) Use a task queue. My environment was Python, so I had the beautiful Rabbit and Celery to work with. Never ended up having to scale, but the intention was that using a distributed task queue, it was built such that we could just add other nodes to do the fetching tasks if we needed to.