Saturday, April 22, 2006

OPML Reading Lists and Scalability

Dave Winer and Amyloo are talking about the scalability of OPML Reading Lists using polling - apparently there is a move afoot to set up ping servers for OPML:

If you have a pinging protocol, unless you're going to send a ping to every subscriber (which isn't practical because of firewalls and NATs), you're going to have to ask some central authority whether something has changed, and nothing is more efficient at that than eTags, nor as widely implemented, nor as utterly optimized.

 Pinging OPML is no worse than RSS in terms of polling problems and if you were going to set up a ping service, you'd probably want to make it a general ping service for any time of HTTP resource that is likely to be polled. Reading lists are interesting because they are a collection of things so the situation is actually better not worse because the OPML file can be a proxy for all the content it represents if the OPML file published the eTags of the resources that it is a collection of then a smart aggregator would only have to ping the OPML file rather than all of the things in the list (see Syndicating Ping State with OPML and OPML Reading Lists for Optimized Feed Sync for more details)

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home