Attn Apple users using our Forum RSS Feeds

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CraigRat
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Attn Apple users using our Forum RSS Feeds

Post by CraigRat » 23 March 11 7:45 pm

Can you PLEASE check your RSS reader's update times and make sure you are only refreshing the forum RSS feed at a reasonable rate (every 5 mins is PLENTY).

We have an abnormal amount of Apple clients refreshing their feeds too rapidy, in one case every 6 seconds. This could be either Safari or iTunes or something else, I don't know, I'm not an Apple user.

We have blocked one user already, and will block any other users who create abnormal loads on our system.

Initial investigations point to OS X's RSS reader.

Your co-operation in this matter is appreciated.

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Re: Attn Apple users using our Forum RSS Feeds

Post by caughtatwork » 24 March 11 8:20 am

We are still requesting you take note of this request.
We have a number of people, again this morning, polling the syndication feed too often.
Trust us, we don't get new posts every 6 seconds.
If you cannot be responsible for yourself, we will be responsible for everyone and shut the syndication down across the board.

PLEASE adjust your poll to 5 minutes or more.

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Re: Attn Apple users using our Forum RSS Feeds

Post by SamWalkers » 24 March 11 9:51 am

This could read:
In Safari go to preferences,
Select the RSS tab,
at <check for updates> select an option greater then 5 minutes.

Except in my version of Safari I get a pull down tab with 3 options, the smallest is 30 minutes.
Can you verify that it is Safari not a third party reader?

Google reader?

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Re: Attn Apple users using our Forum RSS Feeds

Post by caughtatwork » 24 March 11 10:31 am

"GET /syndication.php HTTP/1.1" 200 19377 "-" "Apple-PubSub/65.21"
"GET /syndication.php HTTP/1.1" 200 19377 "-" "Apple-PubSub/65.20"

Looks like OSX specifically, but is possibly part of Safari or a standalone.
Either way, stop it.

That particular reader is pulling 5Mb per second out of the machine and it can't continue so if they won't play nice, we'll shut the whole thing down which will impact everyone.

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Richary
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Re: Attn Apple users using our Forum RSS Feeds

Post by Richary » 24 March 11 9:28 pm

Knowing almost nothing about Macs (apart from being the owner of a new work iPhone) I wonder if this is related?

http://tlindner.macmess.org/?p=300

So if someone has the site in their topsites list for whatever reason it might be doing it, even if they aren't aware of it?

No real suggestions here, apart from seeing if you can correlate the IP they are coming from with those logged for forum users.

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Re: Attn Apple users using our Forum RSS Feeds

Post by caughtatwork » 24 March 11 9:39 pm

Anything is possible, so thanks for posting that. We get 90% of the syndication requests from PubSub.
You don't have to be logged into get the syndication so we can't tell who the IP address belongs to.

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Re: Attn Apple users using our Forum RSS Feeds

Post by CraigRat » 24 March 11 10:07 pm

Richary wrote:Knowing almost nothing about Macs (apart from being the owner of a new work iPhone) I wonder if this is related?

http://tlindner.macmess.org/?p=300

So if someone has the site in their topsites list for whatever reason it might be doing it, even if they aren't aware of it?

No real suggestions here, apart from seeing if you can correlate the IP they are coming from with those logged for forum users.
Good find!

If the behaviour whichever app is doing this keeps up we will look at minimum at blocking the useragent for PubSub, which is less drastic than blocking IP's, but means some people will not be able to subscribe to the RSS feeds.

RSS feeds have always been a bit of a problem for us, some time back the 5th or 6th most visited page on the main site was for a specific cacher's RSS feed, and not even a very active cacher, but they must have set their RSS feed up to grab it every 2 or 3 minutes.....

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Re: Attn Apple users using our Forum RSS Feeds

Post by CraigRat » 24 March 11 11:04 pm

We have officially blocked access to Apple-PubSub from our Forum subdomain. This may impact users using Safari's RSS readers or other such features.

We apologise for this, but this client in particular is consuming a far greater amount of YOUR resources than it should be.

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Re: Attn Apple users using our Forum RSS Feeds

Post by CraigRat » 25 March 11 12:23 am

We've found the issue, and it's with Safari

It appears that unlike other browsers, it's seeing there's a RSS feed for the forum pages and fetching the WHOLE CONTENTS of that feed every time someone goes to a forum page (pre-fetching)

The block will stand for now, and we'll look at something else to either cache the feeds or Apple make the browser behave properly.

Thank to Horus for helping with the debugging.

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