policy for polling rss

Question

I have an application that polls several rss sources on the web.

What is the etiquette when polling other\'s web servers. How frequently to poll, etc?

What a

Answer 1

Google's FeedFetcher claims it polls rss feed slightly less than once per hour.

From: http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxfeeds/documentation/

Feed Crawl Frequency

As the Google AJAX Feed API uses Feedfetcher, feed data from the AJAX Feed API may not always be up to date. The Google feed crawler ("Feedfetcher") retrieves feeds from most sites less than once every hour. Some frequently updated sites may be refreshed more often.

Answer 2

Well I'm going to go out there, ignoring the posts that say "Google says, we do", and say: as often as you realistically need to.

RSS is there to keep you up to date. If a feed publishes 10 items an hour but only shows five, you'll miss five of those items and the feed isn't serving its purpose. You might as well not hit it at all.

Of course, you can't hammer the server with requests but if they're publishing enough to have you requesting once a minute, I don't see how it's unreasonable to match that rate.