Wired News: Will RSS Readers Clog the Web?
As RSS feeds proliferate (almost every major American newspaper site and blog has one) and as more and more Internet users adopt readers, websites and bloggers are starting to feel the weight of thousands of hourly pings.
Bloglines tries to be a nice aggregator, hitting sites only once an hour and then serving the feeds to readers through its computers, says Mark Fletcher, chief executive of Bloglines in the article. The potential problem is from RSS readers residing on individual computers hitting sites at the same time.