Real-world RSS throttling on Slashdot.
December 15th, 2004
Slashdot is the grand-daddy of early adopter websites, and as such has the most-subscribed-to RSS feed in the known universe. (If you look at individual metrics such as the top Bloglines feeds, Slashdot wins handily with over 20,000 subscribers.) Slashdot may have been the first website to actually implement RSS throttling (due to being the first website to need it); the policy states that clients are blocked not by instantaneous polling frequency, but with a sliding hourlong window.
I recently wrote about RSS throttling techniques, and expressed my concern at the scalability of tracking RSS hogs on the server. Slashdot’s Jamie McCarthy has just written a thoughtful response, including details of Slashdot’s implementation.