RSS Roundtable
October 18th, 2004
Mac RSS app authors gloss over the issue of RSS scalability in this
roundtable discussion. “It’s not much of an issue” is the consensus, since “RSS scales very well – its cost is almost directly proportional to the number of subscribers.” Frankly, that is not scalability, especially when that linear cost is all applied to one publishing node. A truly scalable RSS solution would have sublinear cost for the publisher (preferably constant). And the argument that users don’t need news more often than 60 or 30 minutes? Just an artifact of the current architecture. Users can have their news sooner; we can all have stockbroker-fast information delivery. The research is there and the technology exists. Watch this space…