Comment I agree with you. (Score 3, Informative) 351
I just fired up ethereal and refreshed my RSS reader. Out of the dozen or so feeds I monitor, a few of them are using Etags and sensible cache-control headers, so I just get 304 Not Modified. Of the rest, not a single one is compressing even though my client is specifying gzip and deflate in its Accept-Encoding header.
HTTP compression will work even better here than it does for regular pages - RSS is basically all text so every response is going to be compressible. Looking at a handful of my feeds, some quick messing about with wget & gzip gives me an average compression ratio of 3:1. That's a 66% reduction in bandwidth utilization. If just half of your clients support HTTP compression, it's still a significant savings.
Now, the article is talking about poorly designed aggregators that don't check whether the content's changed (I'm assuming he's talking about Etags). There's not much you can do about that, but using compression for capable clients sure seems like it would be a good thing.
HTTP compression will work even better here than it does for regular pages - RSS is basically all text so every response is going to be compressible. Looking at a handful of my feeds, some quick messing about with wget & gzip gives me an average compression ratio of 3:1. That's a 66% reduction in bandwidth utilization. If just half of your clients support HTTP compression, it's still a significant savings.
Now, the article is talking about poorly designed aggregators that don't check whether the content's changed (I'm assuming he's talking about Etags). There's not much you can do about that, but using compression for capable clients sure seems like it would be a good thing.
