Bryan Labutta's Profile

in my opinion, PuSH is the better protocol for now. There are basically three things that make PuSH a more robust protocol:

First, PuSH doesn’t just tell you that something changed, it actually sends you the new content (also known as a “fat ping.”) This is an important feature that is missing from rssCloud.  Not only do fat pings make integration simpler for subscribers, they also eliminate the danger of inadvertent denial of service attacks as thousands of subscribers respond to the ping notification and request the updated feed at exactly the same time.  This problem is well known in computer science and is often referred to as “the thundering herd problem.”  While this would be relatively simple to fix in rssCloud, it has yet to be addressed.

Second, PuSH allows variable callbacks (custom URL’s for where the notification is sent) which rssCloud does not.  The rssCloud specification states “Notifications are sent to the IP address the request came from. You can not request notification on behalf of another server.”  This is highly limiting since you cannot separate the servers which are handling subscriptions from the servers which are receiving the ping notifications.

Third, PuSH has a more friendly policy for handling unsubscribes.  In rssCloud, every feed is automatically unsubscribed after 25 hours.  In PuSH, there is an explicit unsubscribe function with the option to automatically unsubscribe after a given amount of time.  Again, this small detail matters a lot when you’re operating at scale.  With rssCloud, RSS readers will be responsible for resubscribing millions of feeds every night – which is far less efficient than sending subscribe/unsubscribe requests only when something changes.