RSS Bandwidth Strategies
December 21st, 2004Much concern, hand wringing and advice on RSS bandwidth issues lately. (see Regular Sucking Schedule, and HowTo RSS Feed State). Here’s some more.
skipHours (and co.), ttl, and mod_syndication are all considered harmful. They’re all under specified, highly ambiguous, poorly supported, poorly implemented, and move logic into the file which should be (and is) in the protocol. Rule of thumb, if your bandwidth saving mechanism is in your feed, it’s a mistake. They promise false hopes of salvation, ignore them.
HTTP Will Save You
Rather look to:- Conditional GET, learn it, live it, love it. Trivial to support, you have my permission to ban clients which don’t support it.
- GZIP encoding, the obvious solution to bandwidth concerns is to swap a little CPU (and the magic of HTTP caching really does minimize it), for a whole lot of bandwidth savings. Been looking for a reason to upgrade to Apache 2.0? How about moddeflate is included by default and is more stable then the arcane (and nomadic) modgzip (which was a beacon a in the darkness in its day)
- RFC 3229 aka HTTP deltas, and modspeedyfeed (reason #2 for upgrading Apache 2.0). Wave of the future, next puncture in the equilibrium, Sam has some notes: Varg ETag, Syndication with RFC3229, RFC3229 enabled, modspeedyfeed.
It’s All About Apache2 and HTTP/1.1
This post also does double duty as the my weighing in on Apache2 vs PHP mini- controversy
2 Comments
May 12th, 2007 at 3:37 pm
I’m looking for a way to access to the two fields If-Modified-Since and ETag from a CGI application. How do I do that please ? (I did not found any thing like it in the environnements variables, so I wonder how to get those fields).
May 19th, 2007 at 7:02 pm
Well… it appears that as of CGI/1.1 (which is honnored by most of Apache server), the If-Modified-Since field from the HTTP request header, should be stored in the HTTPIFMODIFIEDSINCE environment variable. That would be nice… if it could work. I have done some tests, and I still can’t find this environment variable HTTPIFMODIFIEDSINCE.
So the question is now : is there a way to tell Apache to always initiliaze this environment variable ? I’ve made some test with an SetEnvIf clause in an .htaccess file, but failed to get a successful result.
If some one know to tell Apache to store the expected value in this variable, this would be great and welcome