Friday, December 05, 2003

Use of RSS Enclosures Considered Harmful I thought I'd throw the old "considered harmful" gag in to tease the search engines. Well, I'm having trouble posting my comment James Robinson's RSS Enclosure concern, so I'll just post my thought here. Here's the error message: Comments are not allowed on this entry. Strange, considering the customary MT comment form at the bottom. Hmmm... <comment> I agree with you (James) on the problem of the volume of requests X the size of the enclosure turning into a "DoS attack." Although, a Denial of Service attack usually *does* imply malicious intent. It is a very normal problem for demand to suddenly exceed capacity, thus the phrase "a victim of your own success." This is how the term "slashdotted" was coined--not because the files were big, but that SlashDot's audience is so big, that when a link to a low-capacity (definitely unclustered) web resource is requested by a large volume of people simultaneously, something goes kablooey. Eventually, even if the web server delivering the resource was robust enough to work within its capacity without crashing, a critical mass in the number of servicable requests would occur. And, depending on your aggregator's tolerance for failure and ability to retry, those agents turned away by the server the first time will spread their retries out so the net effect is a constant, heavy stream. <pause comment> Intermission: Here are some Slashdotted links: Tim Bray - On Being Slashdotted WikiPedia's entry for "Slashdotted" Linux World: CmdrTaco [audio] on How to Survive Being Slashdotted </pause comment> I will say this though--I get a ton of email newsletters (that I requested, mind you) that I never get around to reading. They sit and collect digital dust in my Inbox/email archives. While I can choose to archive RSS content to my heart's content, with RSS, the content (at least from the publisher) is always fresh and timely, and I pull the feed. Nobody pushes it on me like spam, or sometimes just as unbearable, your wife's crazy uncle who can't seem to stop sending you the latest executable attachment of Santa getting stuck in the chimney, or whatever. Your comment about stopping your aggregator's implementation of enclosures reveals this advantage. You're right it's just another link. You can ignore at your whim. "Enclosures" in that way may be a misnomer, but when compared to "attachments" that show up in my Inbox unwanted, I think we sometimes take RSS for granted. And, if you ever do implement enclosures in your aggregator, you could always bake in some policy features that limit the size of the automatic download, optionally send you an email to inform you about large undownloaded enclosures from a particular source if you really care enough about it. Bottom line, you're in control, and you seem to have done very nicely with your control thus far. <comment>

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