Allow lower RSS refresh times in trusted environments

[Guspaz]

I've got uTorrent as part of an automated download system. As part of that system, uTorrent is hitting an rss feed on the same box that it's on. Unfortunately, the minimum RSS refresh time of 5 minutes introduces quite a bit of extra latency into the process, even though it's my own RSS feed I'm hitting!

Because of this, I propose that uTorrent allow lower times than 5 minutes in trusted scenarios. I have two ideas for implementation:

1) If uTorrent is provided a feed whose URL is the localhost, allow refresh times lower than 5 minutes

2) Have uTorrent read something specific in the XML file that specifies that times lower than 5 minutes are allowed. Such as including it in the xml tag, so "<?xml version="1.0"?>" might become "<?xml version="1.0" utorrent="fastrss"?>", or some similar idea.

[WebReaper]

No, no, no, no no.

All this would do is provide some way for people to local-proxy RSS feeds and then hammer servers. Given that the RSS was withdrawn for a tracker I'm on about a month ago because too many people hit it too often, I'd be against this.

Under what scenario would an RSS feed need to be hit more than every 5 minutes anyway?

[Guspaz]

That was why I suggested having a specific property or XML tag that could be in the RSS feed that would indicate an override for the minimum interval; a proxied RSS feed wouldn't be modifying the RSS feed.

The scenario is that I mirror content for someone else. They release via BitTorrent, and don't have an RSS feed. Instead they have a specific page designed for automated scraping with the stipulation that it can only be accessed every 30 minutes.

So every 30 minutes, I have a cron job that grabs their feed, and pops out an XML file onto the local disk. uTorrent is monitoring this local file. Unfortunately, since uTorrent only checks every 5 minutes, that means that it doesn't even notice that the RSS feed has been updated for up to five minutes! That can be significant latency. The goal is to get this stuff mirrored as fast as possible, which helps with peak demand. The faster I get it up, the shallower the peak is. The longer it takes, the more people are waiting to hit the thing when it does go up.

So, because the RSS file is effectively a static file on the local disk, there is no reason why uTorrent couldn't hit it more frequently. Heck, I'd have it check it every fifteen seconds, if I could. It isn't like reading in a tiny file off the local disk every fifteen seconds is going to cause a lot of disk load on an already busy server.

It might seem like since there is a 30 minute interval between updates of the RSS feed, there isn't any point in shaving off another five minutes. But trust me, when you deal in volume, every minute matters. Shaving off five whole minutes would be a huge step.

[Ultima]

A proxy can be used to filter and modify content passing through it, though, so it would likely be a trivial matter to remove that tag if one can set the proxy up. At the rate with you wish to check for updates, RSS probably isn't an ideal solution. The auto-load feature sounds more like it -- save the torrent file in the specified directory, µTorrent will automatically load the torrent job, and everything runs instantly.