News aggregators and bandwidth.
Mark has a good point. I've had my news aggregator set to update once an hour.. that's really excessive and unnecessary.. I read it maybe once or twice a day, what's the point of constant updating? Changed it to once every 4 hours, and since it now runs on my laptop it'll actually be closer to once or twice a day.
A large percentage of my traffic is news aggregators.. a quick calculation puts it at 25%, I'm probably off on that though.. so far it's not a problem, yet, as I don't pay for my bandwidth and if it does become a problem I have other options I can utilize.. (I do a lot of little sys-admin work here and there for friends and aquaintances, that gets me freebies.. like bandwidth). This isn't a complaint.. just more or less an agreement with Mark -- no need to update hourly something that isn't read that often.
Comments
Hm, it looks like aggregators are very little of my bandwidth compared to search engine crawlers and random visitors.
Posted by: Jeremy Zawodny | October 23, 2002 12:45 AM
It depends on the Aggregator you are using. The more intelligent ones allow you to configure the update frequency by feed. That way, feeds that don't update often can maybe be updated once a day at the most. Other feeds maybe warrant more frequent updates. Yet other feeds maybe only need a manual update when you want it to. Unfortunately some of the aggregator writers don't see this as much of a useful feature.
Posted by: Tim A | October 23, 2002 03:49 PM