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I'm writing a little application for my own use which will consume a publicly published RSS feed.
As far as I can tell, there's no subscribe/post mechanism in the protocol; I need to have my application HTTP-GET the RSS feed periodically.
If that's the case, I'd like to grab it every ten minutes or so, but I'm worried about being seen as an abuser. I'd certainly be concerned if I saw someone poking my server every ten minutes for weeks on end.
Is this a valid concern? Is there any general advice on what a "reasonable" refresh rate is? Do I even have my facts straight?
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The lag time between posting a story and seeing it pop up in the RSS feed is usually a few minutes, and then it can take another 10 to 15 minutes or so for it to appear in something like Google Reader. And the TechCrunch feed is probably checked more frequently for updates than most other feeds.
Is it still used online? Yes and no. RSS feeds are certainly still present (more on this later), but they aren't as dominant as they once were. Social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and others have become the go-to option for following sites, watching feeds, and learning about the latest content.
While RSS feeds are still in use, they're becoming less popular with the use of social media and email subscriptions. Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn bring you the latest news from a site if you follow their profile.
When Outlook doesn't find a TTL, everything defaults to 60 minutes. So in this default situation, Outlook will check for updates at most once per hour.
Since RSS is built on the HTTP protocol, in general, most sites should respect the If-Modified-Since HTTP header. This is fairly lightweight and most servers should be able to return this information quickly.
So for the client-side, you'll need to keep track of the last time you've sent the request and pass it to the server. If the server returns a 304 code, then you'll know that nothing has changed. But even more importantly, the server doesn't need to return the feed info, saving bytes of traffic. If the server returns a 200, then you'll need to process the results and save the response date.
Ultimately, the answer to this question depends on what type of information is at the other end of the RSS feed. If it is a blog, then probably once every 4-8 hours is sufficient. But if RSS feed is a feed of stock quote (not likely, just an example), then every 10 minutes is not sufficient.
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