Site News: RSS Feeds temporarily disabled

Submitted by kbahey on Wed, 2006-04-12 17:47.

Operation

In an attempt to address why Creative Bits is slow at times, we have temporarily disabled RSS feeds to assess their impact on performance.

We appreciate your patience while we try to address this issue.

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Drupal development and customization: 2bits.com
Personal: Baheyeldin.com

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Thanks Khalid. We really

Submitted by Ivan on Wed, 2006-04-12 18:08.

Thanks Khalid. We really appreciate your efforts locating the problem.

Cool

Submitted by Jammo on Wed, 2006-04-12 18:52.

Well, the page loaded a lot faster this time - hehe

Thanks for the support Khalid!

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jammindesigns.co.uk

How often is the RSS feed

Submitted by Waleed on Thu, 2006-04-13 07:40.

How often is the RSS feed file updated? I think I have mine set for once every 3 hours, that should be ok, right?

Waleed
www.waleedsgallery.biz

seems faster to me

Submitted by William on Thu, 2006-04-13 13:25.

I have always suggested that changing the RSS feed system would _greatly_ speed up the system.

Creating an RSS feed from a static file would be a good way speed up and keep the features.

Will

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http://www.macscan.net/

Some more info

Submitted by kbahey on Tue, 2006-04-18 19:14.

Some more info on this, specifically to Will and Waleed.

There is no "feed file" per se. Drupal generates feeds on demand. And there is more than one feed. There is the main page feed (node/feed), as well as other feed pages (e.g. per categories, blogs, ...etc.).

When I looked in the logs in real time, I found that there were way too many requests for feeds (e.g. node/feed, blah/feed, ...etc.) in a very short time. Many of those are from applets/widgets that people have installed and poll the site at predefined intervals. This is not an issue when you have 100 peope do so, but once you reach a high enough number, this becomes in effect very much like a distributed Denial Of Sevice (DDoS) attack, where too many people are hitting your site too fast and everyone is slow.

So, the quickest method was to turn this off by some programming, to first make sure that this indeed is the issue or not, and while we think of a more permanent solution.

Here are a few questions to the community to think of:

- Do people who use feeds miss them?
- Can they live without them?

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Drupal development and customization: 2bits.com
Personal: Baheyeldin.com

I'd have to say that the

Submitted by afterglow on Tue, 2006-04-18 23:25.

I'd have to say that the feeds are the primary way I access the site. I didn't actually realize there was an issue with the slowness as I didn't see the RSS post on the feed.

Obviously if they are having a performance effect on the site, it should be debated but I thinking disabling them altogether would be a step back.

afterglow.ie - Icons, interfaces, illustration

cache rss

Submitted by William on Wed, 2006-04-19 09:58.

I realize there is no feed file as such, that is really my point.

Currently the RSS feed is generated by PHP on each request from a user. Even if the caching system is enabled then it still requires a couple of lookups to to the database.

My suggestion is to create a php script which will fetch the the RSS feed, and then store that as a file on the server. Every time a client asks for this file they are given the cached 'static' file. This means they do not have to touch any of the drupal code. I can build in a script which will regenerate the cache file once per hour, or whatever we decide. The script would only need to be 10 or 20 lines of code.

Curently there are no optimizers or cache systems installed. Hence for every request from every rss reader invokes thousands of lines of PHP code and two calls to the database. This is about 100 times less efficient than serving a static HTML file.

Also, do you not think a single RSS feed for the entire site is sufficient ? There are not so many articles that we need seperate feeds.

Will

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http://www.macscan.net/

CB Speed/Feed issue

Submitted by thornysarus on Tue, 2006-04-18 20:30.

Speed: Seems to be faster today, but not nearly as fast as I remember it to be a few months ago.

Feed: Yeah. I gotta say that I miss the feeds. I subscribe to the blog and forum feeds through NetNewsWire and it's just convenient.

Can I live without them? Sure. But the feeds allow us to instantly know when a post goes up and post a reply promptly, thus serving the CB communitie's needs better. Especially when troubleshooting.

My 2-bits.

Terry Thornhill

e-zign Design Group

Wise or not

Submitted by mokenke on Sat, 2006-04-22 06:59.

Whatever you need to do guys keep up with the awesome site. I have enjoyed the unpolluted style with which you present yourselves to this creative community.

peace

Andres

About the feeds

Submitted by mokenke on Sat, 2006-04-22 07:08.

I feel I will miss the feeds if you had to get rid of them. I came back to the site after a couple of weeks thinking that something might be wrong with the RSS feeds. That is what primarily drove me to Creative Bits. Nevertheless, I do visit the site spontaneously and I would certainly sacrifice convenience for speed. Especially if quality content is being updated consistently.

Andres