Two months of feed reader behavior analysis
An analysis of feed reader behavior revealed significant request handling patterns, with some applications like Netvibes and NextCloud-News facing caching issues, while others like Miniflux performed better.
Read original article
Over the past two months, an analysis of feed reader behavior has revealed significant patterns in request handling among various applications. The project, initiated at the end of May, logged over 70,000 requests from 97 unique keys. Notably, some applications exhibited poor caching and polling behaviors. For instance, Netvibes faced caching errors, while SpaceCowboys Android RSS Reader displayed erratic polling intervals. NextCloud-News and Feedbin were identified as having severe caching issues, leading to frequent unconditional requests. In contrast, some applications like Miniflux and rawdog demonstrated proper caching and pacing.
Several feed readers, including NetNewsWire and FreshRSS, consistently generated unconditionals and displayed erratic timing, raising concerns about their efficiency. Others, like Yarr and bdrss, managed to maintain better request patterns, although timing issues persisted. The analysis highlighted the importance of proper configuration and the impact of caching mechanisms on performance. Overall, while some applications showed improvement, many still struggled with fundamental issues, suggesting a need for users to choose their feed readers carefully based on these behaviors. The findings underscore the variability in feed reader performance and the necessity for ongoing monitoring and adjustments to enhance user experience.
Related
How to waste bandwidth, battery power, and annoy sysadmins
Web browsers' excessive requests waste bandwidth and drain battery. Firefox for iOS' flawed link requests, especially for favicons, strain servers inefficiently. Users are cautioned about negative impacts, stressing efficient browsing.
How I scraped 6 years of Reddit posts in JSON
The article covers scraping 6 years of Reddit posts for self-promotion data, highlighting challenges like post limits and cutoffs. Pushshift is suggested for Reddit archives. Extracting URLs and checking website status are explained. Findings reveal 40% of sites inactive. Trends in online startups are discussed.
Data Fetching for Single-Page Apps
Efficient data fetching in single-page applications is crucial for responsiveness. Key patterns include Asynchronous State Handler, Parallel Data Fetching, Fallback Markup, Code Splitting, and Prefetching. Optimizing data fetching enhances application performance universally.
90% of performance is data access patterns
A recent analysis revealed that 90% of application performance issues arise from data access patterns. A platform team improved performance by eliminating redundant API requests, reducing daily calls significantly and enhancing latency.
NetNewsWire and Conditional Get Issues
Brent Simmons addresses bugs in NetNewsWire's conditional GET support, revealing issues with feed data processing. He suggests improved logic for updates and stresses the need for further testing to ensure reliability.
11 commentsIf the feed was last updated (for example) 1 hour ago, and the response lacks a `Cache-Control` header, in that case the response would be cached for 6 minutes (10% of 1 hour; the 10% is mentioned in RFC 9111 section 4.2.2).
[1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Caching#he...
[2]: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc9111#name-calculati...
Before, but very before in the past, I've tried few desktops one, and the final choice was a Java/SWIG one RSSOwl, heavy but effective enough compared to others. I've also used for a period elfeed (Emacs) but it's too slow to read feeds for me, Emacs offer UI for focused read, while for a large amount of low importance posts I need something allowing a very quick pass even if something get lost.
A thing I miss in ALL feed readers I've tried so far is real-world filtering abilities like fuzzy-matching titles to reasonably show only one per kind of news (let's say you follow many newspapers and nearly all report the same news about an earthquake somewhere, there is no point in seeing let's say 12 posts on the same event), eventually offering a button to show all the matched if I want to go through them. Another is historical analysis, let's say every years there are wildfires around the world, I'd like to see from news I've read if they are almost the same of the last year or more, if they start to appear earlier and last longer etc, it's still fuzzy keywords matching, nothing so hard, but still absent in all, I imaging I'm one of the very few interested in such automation to use feeds as a personal aggregator. Gnus with scoring offer something similar, but well, it's too slow to really skim things, and easy to break as well.
I can see in my logs that it constantly makes over ~20 requests to different RSS feeds on my domain, all in the exact same millisecond. Happens multiple times a day. And it appears to rotate IPs. Scary… Tried reaching out to the developer about it twice, but they never responded.
Rachel's complaint about Feedly's overzealous polling also contrasts the experience of author John Scalzi, where his blog was simply getting ignored by Feedly:
https://whatever.scalzi.com/2024/08/02/the-feedly-issue-appa...
Not entirely sure what the criticism here is other than polling on average every 12 minutes seems a little excessive at best. Why does in matter it the intervals are a bit wonky? I could think of many reasons why: maybe the poll intervals are smaller during the daytime and more spread out over the night to optimize for reading conditions, etc
I'd like to see a description of what the proper behavior is in this context. The OP uses terms like timing, pacing, conditionals, and unconditionals in a way that makes me think that these must be well-defined jargon in the context of RSS, but I don't see these in the RSS spec.
Related
How to waste bandwidth, battery power, and annoy sysadmins
Web browsers' excessive requests waste bandwidth and drain battery. Firefox for iOS' flawed link requests, especially for favicons, strain servers inefficiently. Users are cautioned about negative impacts, stressing efficient browsing.
How I scraped 6 years of Reddit posts in JSON
The article covers scraping 6 years of Reddit posts for self-promotion data, highlighting challenges like post limits and cutoffs. Pushshift is suggested for Reddit archives. Extracting URLs and checking website status are explained. Findings reveal 40% of sites inactive. Trends in online startups are discussed.
Data Fetching for Single-Page Apps
Efficient data fetching in single-page applications is crucial for responsiveness. Key patterns include Asynchronous State Handler, Parallel Data Fetching, Fallback Markup, Code Splitting, and Prefetching. Optimizing data fetching enhances application performance universally.
90% of performance is data access patterns
A recent analysis revealed that 90% of application performance issues arise from data access patterns. A platform team improved performance by eliminating redundant API requests, reducing daily calls significantly and enhancing latency.
NetNewsWire and Conditional Get Issues
Brent Simmons addresses bugs in NetNewsWire's conditional GET support, revealing issues with feed data processing. He suggests improved logic for updates and stresses the need for further testing to ensure reliability.