At the top of the webstats, the smoking gun: 30,000 requests for the Drupal-generated RSS feed from teledyn.com (...) The way RSS is to work, everyone subscribes to a small file on your site. The critical word there is ‘everyone’. (...) Herein the black hole of RSS: If your feed works, if you are successful in attracting subscriptions on a global scale, if you do it right, you are doomed.As friends tell friends, as links lead to visits which lead to subscribers, the snowball rolls on towards that day like last Friday. RSS may have the potential to be a saver on bandwidth, but when you are getting hit once an hour or more by thousands of sites, 24,000 extra hits ads up, and it’s all the worse when so many are using broken clients that ignore the caching rules. (...) I’m not sure there is an obvious solution. We might install globally distributed caching of RSS files on behalf of the sites, isolating them from the broken clients, but isn’t that already in place? Isn’t that what proxy servers for AOL and other ISPs do to “speed up your internet” already?...