Both Nathan Stocks and Wade Billings took time to send me a link to Chad Dickerson's article on RSS growing pains. Chad's point: RSS as currently architected doesn't scale. RSS scalability has a few things going for it, most notably it's built on to of the Web which has shown to be hugely scalable. The problem has more to do with client implementations that don't always issue conditional GET requests or respect the resulting 304 Not Modified responses. Also, as Chad points out, many clients are set by default to check for changes at the top of the hour rather than spreading the requests out. The more basic problem is that RSS is built on a polling paradigm where clients continually poll the server to get changes. None of these problems are unsolvable and frankly, its nice to have scalability problems. It's a sign of success.