With the speed at which RSS feeds are growing in popularity, two things are becoming necessary. The first is ways to make money from RSS feeds, and the other is to set your server up so it can handle the ever increasing load that RSS will put on your system. This article is concerned only with the second item.
Part of the problem is that most RSS feeders seem to all fetch their feeds every hour on the hour, meaning you get hit by everybody at the same time, the other part of the problem is that many readers don’t check to see if the feed has been updated since the last download and instead just download the whole thing again. To get the most from your RSS, there are two things you should do. The first is to make sure your server uses Gzip compression like mod_gzip or mod_deflate. This will compress the XML to a fraction of its former size which will drastically reduce bandwidth and increase download speed for your users. Those Apache modules will not just improve your RSS feeds, they will improve all text based transfers (like HTML, Javascript, CSS etc).
The second thing is to ensure your feeds support “conditional GET” which basically ensures that a feed isn’t downloaded again if it hasn’t changed since the last download. Many blogs now support conditional GET, so you should check to make sure yours does also. A good choice of blog that supports both Gzip and conditional GET is WordPress, but it certainly isn’t the only one. By following the above steps, you can significantly reduce your own bandwidth bills, and also give your users a faster more pleasant experience. To check if your feed or site is using Gzip compression, you can run it though this handy tester. To help lower your peak bandwidth, you should also encourage your users to set their readers to update feeds at random times but set intervals so that they spread the load over the full hour rather then all fetching the feeds on the hour.
