10 ms·

How many of my TL;DR points here https://www.earth.org.uk/RSS-efficiency.html https://www.earth.org.uk/RSS-efficiency.html do you already deal with, out of inte

How many of my TL;DR points here https://www.earth.org.uk/RSS-efficiency.html https://www.earth.org.uk/RSS-efficiency.html do you already deal with, out of interest?

radulucut 2y ago
2 and 3 so far, but I am planning to support the others as well, thanks.
- DamonHD 2y ago
  Hurrah! I have those listed in likely order of resource/climate impact, so if I could nudge you towards considering (1) sooner then even bettererer! B^>
cogman10 2y ago
Not that I disagree with this for any HTTP service, but how big of an issue is the network/compute power for RSS? Seems like a minor payload to be delivered. I guess it makes a difference in the performance/UX of the reader itself.
- hk__2 2y ago
  In addition to performance it also has to do with politeness: it’s not polite to ask for the same resources again and again from a server when you could cache it, especially when it has explicit headers about it in its response. Think of small self-hosted blogs with hundreds of readers that constantly poll it.
  - cogman10 2y ago
    Even with a small self-hosted blog, assuming you have more than a 56k hookup to the internet, a raspberry pi can service up 100s of requests per second. At the time of writing this, the HN rss feed is 12kb. That'd mean you'd need 10Mbps upload to handle 100s of requests to the rss feed per second. (Again, not saying you shouldn't optimize this, just questioning how big a problem it is).
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - DamonHD 2y ago
      When I was being low-grade DDoSed the other day my off-grid RPi3B server was taken out by ~60 bogus requests per second. It is otherwise entirely happy with normal HTTP loads, plus being primary DNS server, SMTP, NTP, ... One podcaster halved its bandwidth bill overnight getting just one of these fixed, see "A saving bandwidth special!": https://podnews.net/update/podlp-cloud-phone https://podnews.net/update/podlp-cloud-phone
- djbusby 2y ago
  The link claims we could save "100kWh per day" and there is a dataset provided (I didn't dig in that yet)
  - DamonHD 2y ago
    I am trying to better assess this number as part of an arXiv paper I am putting together. Maybe even this weekend! RSS/podcast feed polling is a load for which Apple/Amazon/Spotify/Podbean are currently wasting 99%+ of the network and CPU bandwidth for, and thus money and carbon emissions. Many of the creators have limited budgets, and reaching Net Zero is not going to happen by ignoring really easy cases such as this, albeit small in the overall scheme of things.
    - djbusby 2y ago
      Well, I like the link you already posted and expect to see the arXiv one posted to HN as well. I have a home-brew solution for pulling feeds and will be cross reference with your info. One small impact!

How many of my TL;DR points here https://www.earth.org.uk/RSS-efficiency.html https://www.earth.org.uk/RSS-efficiency.html do you already deal with, out of interest?

radulucut 2y ago

2 and 3 so far, but I am planning to support the others as well, thanks.

DamonHD 2y ago
Hurrah! I have those listed in likely order of resource/climate impact, so if I could nudge you towards considering (1) sooner then even bettererer! B^>

cogman10 2y ago

Not that I disagree with this for any HTTP service, but how big of an issue is the network/compute power for RSS? Seems like a minor payload to be delivered. I guess it makes a difference in the performance/UX of the reader itself.

hk__2 2y ago
In addition to performance it also has to do with politeness: it’s not polite to ask for the same resources again and again from a server when you could cache it, especially when it has explicit headers about it in its response. Think of small self-hosted blogs with hundreds of readers that constantly poll it.
- cogman10 2y ago
  Even with a small self-hosted blog, assuming you have more than a 56k hookup to the internet, a raspberry pi can service up 100s of requests per second. At the time of writing this, the HN rss feed is 12kb. That'd mean you'd need 10Mbps upload to handle 100s of requests to the rss feed per second. (Again, not saying you shouldn't optimize this, just questioning how big a problem it is).
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - DamonHD 2y ago
    When I was being low-grade DDoSed the other day my off-grid RPi3B server was taken out by ~60 bogus requests per second. It is otherwise entirely happy with normal HTTP loads, plus being primary DNS server, SMTP, NTP, ... One podcaster halved its bandwidth bill overnight getting just one of these fixed, see "A saving bandwidth special!": https://podnews.net/update/podlp-cloud-phone https://podnews.net/update/podlp-cloud-phone
djbusby 2y ago
The link claims we could save "100kWh per day" and there is a dataset provided (I didn't dig in that yet)
- DamonHD 2y ago
  I am trying to better assess this number as part of an arXiv paper I am putting together. Maybe even this weekend! RSS/podcast feed polling is a load for which Apple/Amazon/Spotify/Podbean are currently wasting 99%+ of the network and CPU bandwidth for, and thus money and carbon emissions. Many of the creators have limited budgets, and reaching Net Zero is not going to happen by ignoring really easy cases such as this, albeit small in the overall scheme of things.
  - djbusby 2y ago
    Well, I like the link you already posted and expect to see the arXiv one posted to HN as well. I have a home-brew solution for pulling feeds and will be cross reference with your info. One small impact!