@dataset{podnews2024testing,
author={James Cridland},
title={Podcast RSS feed testing},
publisher={Podnews},
url={https://podnews.net/article/rss-tests},
urldate={2024-11-11},
year={2024},
month={11},
day={11},
abstract={RSS feeds are how podcasting works - but most podcast apps rely on repeatedly polling RSS feeds. Podnews publishes just one podcast ourselves, but that podcast's RSS feed is requested more than 42,000 times a day.  We wondered who supports compression in feeds like gzip or brotli (which saves around 80\% of bandwidth); and also who supports lastmodified headers and/or etag (i.e. how easy it is to spot whether a feed has been updated.) We tested a set of feeds - the most popular 100 hosts or so - from our podcast sample; we've linked to the specific RSS feed we tested. To test compression, we requested the content using an Accept-Encoding header.},
annote={A significant fraction (about 14\%?) did not support any of gzip (or br) nor last-modified (or etag).  About 9\% supported all of them.},
}