The Math of Safari RSS – 1.4TB a month?!

[With the upgrade to] a brand new Safari browser that can read and display RSS feeds in a simple easy to understand manner. That upgrade while great for the consumers, could come as a big shocker for those blogs whose feeds are included as part of Safari’s default starter package. Infact it could be the biggest stress test for RSS thus far!

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Lets say if one of these news operations updated their site once an hour and each update results in a nominal 5 kilobytes of RSS generated data, then 500,000 simultaneous Safari users polling at top of the hour would mean a total data transfer of over 2 gigabytes per hour. Times 24, and you have over 48 gigabytes of data transfer every day – just from Safari users alone. What if more than a million Tiger Safaris were on the loose. Oh boy! While an addition 48 gigabytes of traffic a day or 1.4 terabyte a month is not that much for large sites, but it will add up.

Well, since you have RSS support why don’t you sign up for our feed.

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