RSS Traffic Burdens Publisher’s Servers:

InfoWorld, which is hosted by Verio, is committed to RSS. But Dickerson says he’s spoken with other large media sites that have delayed implementing RSS feeds, citing potential overhead on IT infrastructure. Some major publishers of RSS feeds are high-traffic sites that already use content distribution and caching to manage server load, such as Yahoo.

While a relatively small number of sites are currently seeing RSS traffic on the scale of InfoWorld, that’s likely to change as the technology becomes more popular. “If RSS is going to go from fairly big to absolutely huge, we’re all going to need to do a little more work on the plumbing,” Dickerson writes.

I wonder if any of the RSS client authors/producers have thought about randomizing thier collection times a bit to spread out the load?

Update:Bloglines‘ CEO has a few thoughts on how to improve the load issue.