Comments on: Respect for HTTP 304: Positive Feedback Loop?

By: Emil Sit » WordPress ETag bug

Emil Sit » WordPress ETag bug — Mon, 03 Apr 2006 17:07:18 +0000

[...] Update: Someone else noticed and was able to file a bug. Their comments led me to realize it was a more recent change, part of the 2.0.2 upgrade, that probably caused the problem. Where are the regression tests? [...]

By: Emil Sit

Emil Sit — Tue, 28 Mar 2006 04:11:41 +0000

I noticed this independently and found your site via the trac.wordpress.org. I tracked down what I thought was
the problem, and a hack to fix it for now. I don’t think my fix has security implications since the results are only being used for string comparison. Here’s my writeup: http://www.emilsit.net/blog/archives/wordpress-etag-bug/

By: Geof F. Morris

Geof F. Morris — Mon, 27 Mar 2006 12:06:51 +0000

While it is true that bandwidth is generally getting cheaper, at some point, the laws of commodity pricing seem to indicate that it will bottom out.

By: Paul Querna

Paul Querna — Mon, 27 Mar 2006 05:47:48 +0000

Bandwidtth is only getting cheaper, the harder part is writing your crawler and backend infrastructure to handle millions of sites, every 30 minutes

By: Geof F. Morris

Geof F. Morris — Mon, 27 Mar 2006 05:05:47 +0000

Paul: It may not ever make sense for Bloglines to do that; if they consider the 30-minute guarantee to be a key component of their service, that's their choice; there'll just be a resource penalty for doing so. Where it might make sense for them, though is in situations where a large feed [say, 30kB] is being loaded every half-hour when the feed averages an update once-a-week. In such a case, you're looking at 48 polls/day * 7 days/week * 30 kB / pull = 9.84375 MB. A penny here, a penny there ...

By: Paul Querna

Paul Querna — Mon, 27 Mar 2006 04:50:59 +0000

Bloglines crawls every feed every 30 minutes. Why would they ever want to delay that for feeds that don’t support 304s?

By: Geof’s Relentless Kvetching About WordPress » Blog Archive » Hoist on My Own Petard

Sun, 26 Mar 2006 02:40:14 +0000

[...] After I lauded software that publishes HTTP 304-aware feeds, Scott tells me that IJSM.org’s feeds are no longer 304-aware. UHOH! [...]

By: Geof F. Morris

Geof F. Morris — Sat, 25 Mar 2006 01:33:43 +0000

Holy hell!? Is this a characteristic of RSS2, or have I borked a server setting?

By: Scott Sanders

Scott Sanders — Sat, 25 Mar 2006 01:32:22 +0000

However ironically, it seems that http://gfmorris.org/feed/rss2/ is not 304 friendly

By: FeedShow

FeedShow — Fri, 24 Mar 2006 09:27:42 +0000

Fast feed refresh and “conditional GET” support

When a feed has not changed since the last fetch, a server can answer the request with a “304 HTTP code”. Not all servers have this feature enabled, and the result is bandwidth loss.
Here’s a good idea from Scott (Feedlounge). Server…

By: Chris

Chris — Thu, 23 Mar 2006 20:04:27 +0000

I saw this on the FL blog this morning, too, and thought it was a brilliant idea. Good use of positive feedback.