Bring Back the 80's!

Your Headline Reader Has Been Framed

Slashdot's RSS service has defamed your headline reader. You are probably not requesting pages more often than their terms of service allow.

Slashdot, the single most popular news portal in the entire blogosphere, has probably issued it's automated "no soup for you" to absolutely every RSS subscriber at some point in time or another. I personally have an RSS reader that I do not set to refresh RSS feeds *at*all*, so it only refreshes feeds when I launch the program to read the news, which is every day or two. Regardless, every week or so Slashdot sees fit to ban me for 72 hours.

I suspect it's because they are confusing BendBroadband's transparent proxy server with an individual newsreader, so that the majority of the city of bend can receive no more than 1 RSS feed update from the cybergiant every 30 minutes, or else the whole town spends three days without soup.

To the best of my knowledge, this problem stems from Slashdot using a CGI to generate it's RSS.. which means every time you hit that URI a program runs and eats a few userseconds of CPU to feed you the same RSS it's fed over a million others around the globe in the last ten minutes or so. That quickly adds up to millions of userseconds, which the powers that be at Slashdot appear to want to ration out to the soupline instead of finding a better way.

One superior method is employed by Movable Type, which keeps your blog posts and RSS feeds available as a collection of static HTML files. Your webserver can painlessly deliver these to one or a billion people on demand. There is no process to run, no database to consult, just a few kilobytes of data to fire down the pipe at whoever asks. Movable Type and similar blogging tools recreate your entire website essentially whenever a new post is authored. This is a moderate amount of work, but it certainly beats recreating the pages for every page view, so long as your blog posts get read more often than they get written.

Other than badly designed CGI's hogging the OSDN servers, the only possible complaints that slashdot could have regarding abuse involve bandwidth. Now I can't weigh a slashdot RSS file just at the moment due to being banned, but wired's rdf/rss file weighs just under 2 kilobytes. Slashdot's front page weighs 120k. So there you go, you would have to request an RSS file 60 times to use up as much bandwidth as a single page request. Counting network overhead, maybe 40 times.

I understand that it can be commulatively frightening to let a newsreader program, who's owner may not be present, pull your RSS file every 5 minutes 24 hours a day.. multiplied by potentially millions of readers.. but stop and do the math. If I requested a 2 kilobyte RSS file EVERY SECOND... 60 times a minute.. from slashdot's servers, over the course of a day and 86400 requests I would have pulled down a whopping 178 megabytes. Granted, most people with files that large feel more comfortable bit-torrenting them, but slashdot's firewalls would have denied a huge percentage of my requests mistaking them for DOS attacks, limiting server impact to a few megabytes per day. Newsreader software would have to support high resolution timers just to attempt more rigorous request schedules than that, which would be treated as DOS with greater degrees of confidence by firewalls and routers.

So, abuser's ISP should clearly be inconvenienced sooner than Slashdot would have to give up more bandwidth on a single abuser than Sourceforge does on someone downloading software.

There is simply no excuse for Slashdot's hackneyed RSS rationing approach. They are guaranteed to waste more CPU time doing the accounting to see how often a certain IP address requests an RSS feed than they would simply serving the feed, and they waste an equivalent amount of bandwidth feeding their self-important guilt-trip message in leui of RSS uopn every request, complete with a custom-tailored UID that you may use in correspondance with them about the incident, but not that you should bother for at least 72 hours, or until they feel more inclined to forgive your terrible transgressions.

Posted by jesse at July 3, 2004 02:29 PM