How Many Items Should I have in an RSS feed?

Question

All the information I could find regarding generating RSS feeds gives examples where an indeterminate number of items is returned.

That doesn't seem too practical, especially if I have a ton of entries and a ton of clients idly polling the feed.

Is there a magic number for how many items I should return? Should I just return everything I have?

Answer 1

I guess that depends on the type of information you syndicate, how often new items are added and the way your audience will use it.

If it's a news feed with dozens of new entries per day, 50 or 60 might be a good number, if it's only updated a few times per month or even less often, 20 will be more than enough.

If it's some kind of specialized information intended to be processed by other software, an entirely different number might be more appropriate.