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Show HN: Cleed – Simple feed reader for the command line

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Re: Show HN: Cleed – Simple feed reader for the command line

#11

Post by hk__2 »

cogman10 wrote: post #9
DamonHD wrote: post #2

How many of my TL;DR points here https://www.earth.org.uk/RSS-efficiency.html do you already deal with, out of interest?

Not that I disagree with this for any HTTP service, but how big of an issue is the network/compute power for RSS? Seems like a minor payload to be delivered. I guess it makes a difference in the performance/UX of the reader itself.

In addition to performance it also has to do with politeness: it’s not polite to ask for the same resources again and again from a server when you could cache it, especially when it has explicit headers about it in its response. Think of small self-hosted blogs with hundreds of readers that constantly poll it.

Re: Show HN: Cleed – Simple feed reader for the command line

#13

Post by djbusby »

cogman10 wrote: post #9
DamonHD wrote: post #2

How many of my TL;DR points here https://www.earth.org.uk/RSS-efficiency.html do you already deal with, out of interest?

Not that I disagree with this for any HTTP service, but how big of an issue is the network/compute power for RSS? Seems like a minor payload to be delivered. I guess it makes a difference in the performance/UX of the reader itself.

The link claims we could save "100kWh per day" and there is a dataset provided (I didn't dig in that yet)

Re: Show HN: Cleed – Simple feed reader for the command line

#15

Post by cogman10 »

hk__2 wrote: post #11
cogman10 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not that I disagree with this for any HTTP service, but how big of an issue is the network/compute power for RSS? Seems like a minor payload to be delivered. I guess it makes a difference in the performance/UX of the reader itself.

In addition to performance it also has to do with politeness: it’s not polite to ask for the same resources again and again from a server when you could cache it, especially when it has explicit headers about it in its response. Think of small self-hosted blogs with hundreds of readers that constantly poll it.

Even with a small self-hosted blog, assuming you have more than a 56k hookup to the internet, a raspberry pi can service up 100s of requests per second.

At the time of writing this, the HN rss feed is 12kb. That'd mean you'd need 10Mbps upload to handle 100s of requests to the rss feed per second.

(Again, not saying you shouldn't optimize this, just questioning how big a problem it is).

Re: Show HN: Cleed – Simple feed reader for the command line

#18

Post by FerretFred »

tester457 wrote: post #10
slightwinder wrote: post #8

Looks nice. But I'ts strange that there are so many "simple" feedreaders. Where are the tools for powerusers? How many feeds and formats are people using usually to be satisfied with simple?

What poweruser tools are you missing in newsboat?

This is an excellent comment!

Re: Show HN: Cleed – Simple feed reader for the command line

#19

Post by toyg »

slightwinder wrote: post #8

Looks nice. But I'ts strange that there are so many "simple" feedreaders. Where are the tools for powerusers? How many feeds and formats are people using usually to be satisfied with simple?

Feedparsing is a classic starter project for people who want to learn a language.

Re: Show HN: Cleed – Simple feed reader for the command line

#20

Post by DamonHD »

djbusby wrote: post #13
cogman10 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not that I disagree with this for any HTTP service, but how big of an issue is the network/compute power for RSS? Seems like a minor payload to be delivered. I guess it makes a difference in the performance/UX of the reader itself.

The link claims we could save "100kWh per day" and there is a dataset provided (I didn't dig in that yet)

I am trying to better assess this number as part of an arXiv paper I am putting together. Maybe even this weekend!

RSS/podcast feed polling is a load for which Apple/Amazon/Spotify/Podbean are currently wasting 99%+ of the network and CPU bandwidth for, and thus money and carbon emissions. Many of the creators have limited budgets, and reaching Net Zero is not going to happen by ignoring really easy cases such as this, albeit small in the overall scheme of things.

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