Invoking FoF with WGET
I’ve changed how I invoke Feed on Feeds for the time being; I think I might make it a permanent change.
I’ve been using Steve’s recommendation: /usr/local/bin/GET -C user:password http://domain.tld/path/to/fof/update-quiet.php
I’m now using: wget –quiet http://user:password@domain.tld/path/to/fof/update-quiet.php
The latter seems to work far faster, and wget is specifically designed to pull files via HTTP.
I probably would have done this all along if I’d realized how to do HTTP authentication in an URL. Duh.
While it’s true that the “update-quiet.php” script is grabbing files, it does that the same way no matter how it’s called. As far as the web server is concerned, there shouldn’t be any difference between using GET and wget. Both produce the same result: sending a single HTTP GET command to the web server. From there, it’s the web server, not GET or wget, that does the work in grabbing the feeds. What wget is doing is saving the output from the webserver (the output of update-quiet.php, which is nothing) to a file. That’s one problem with using wget here: you end up with a pile of empty “update-quiet.php.[rotated integer]” files saved to your home directory.
That being said, it’s interesting that you saw a difference in speed between the two. I just tried it myself (by running each one multiple times). From what I saw, any difference between using GET and wget was completely swallowed by the variable delay encountered by the web server as it tried to fetch the feed data. In other words, in a horse race, either one of them might win, depending on how long it took the web server to fetch the data on that particular run.
October 30th, 2004 at 09:34