Apple: Safari Lead DDoS and Web Performance Threat to RSS?

April 28th, 2005 by smp | Filed under smp.

Om Malik points out a potential threat to blogs: OSX 10.4 “Tiger”. The new Safari that ships with this OS comes with the RSS reader turned on by default!

That upgrade while great for the consumers, could come as a big shocker for those blogs whose feeds are included as part of Safaris default starter package. Infact it could be the biggest stress test for RSS thus far!

Most RSS readers are set to poll for updates every hour, and imagine when half-a-million Tiger Safari users who start hitting a server at the same time, pulling down RSS updates, because they have not changed the default settings. Server meltdown? Or an unintended denial of service? Apple says that most of the default feeds are going to be major news sites like CNN. New York Times, and LA Times. At this time they are not including any personal blogs as part of the default list. Even for them it is not going to be easy.

As a Web performance geek, I ask you: do you measure and monitor the performance and availability of your blog infrastructure?

Didn’t think so….

Enjoy the Weekend!