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This is a good lesson on being a good citizen of the Internet. It's easy to just curl a feed every second, but should you? (Of course not) Take it as a challe
by theshrike79 2y ago
This is a good lesson on being a good citizen of the Internet.
It's easy to just curl a feed every second, but should you? (Of course not)
Take it as a challenge to make your reader as fancy as possible, use every trick in the book to optimise how it fetches content. Analyse the patterns of releasing new content per feed and adjust the fetch frequency based on that.
And if you're building a reader for distribution, don't let the user set a refresh interval that doesn't make sense.
- flir 2y agoLike writing lift control software. Minutes to learn, a life time to master. But I bet you can get 95% of the benefit with a simple exponential backoff scheme.
- preinheimer 2y agoI feel like polling twice a day (with the right etags) will beat exponential back offs. Exponential back off is great for a lot of problems, but irregularly updated blogs doesn’t seem like one of them.
- flir 2y agoThinking about it, it's not an easy problem to define because it's got a tradeoff. Getting the content quickly (easy: poll in a loop) vs not using server resources (easy: never poll). We have to define "better" before we can decide which solution is better.