Apache sometimes not returning RSS feed

[fbgmantis]

Hey all,
I have a site that tracks Amazon price changes via RSS. As you can guess this means there are a ton of dynamically generated feeds. Bloglines attempts to update many of the feeds at the same time. To combat this I pre-generate the feeds. The problem is bloglines still thinks 33% of the feeds are bad. Looking at the apache access log for the bad feeds I see many lines like this:

65.214.**.151 - - [29/Mar/2006:09:56:18 -0800] "GET /feed/amazon/wishlist/2BCDF**ES6O7J HTTP/1.1" 200 316 "-" "Bloglines/3.0-rho (http;//www.bloglines.com; 1 subscriber)" 

I believe the 316 is the size of the returned page. This is consistent with all the feeds that give errors. Of course when I go directly to that feed it is fine, and I have no way of telling what bloglines got that it thinks is an error. So my question is: Is 316 significant in any way? Some apache error return or timeout? I checked the error log, but there is nothing helpful there.

[edited by: jdMorgan at 4:57 pm (utc) on Mar. 30, 2006]
[edit reason] Obscured specifics per TOS. [/edit]

[jdMorgan]

fbgmantis,

Welcome to WebmasterWorld!

316 is the size of the HTTP response-body. It doesn't give any direct information, but you might want to look at the size of your custom error documents to see if one is 316 bytes in size. If you don't use custom error documents, then it's a bit harder to determine what the default error page sizes are; browsers like Firefox have a Tools->Page Info function that is sometimes useful in these cases.

Jim

[fbgmantis]

Thank you for the reply. I don't use custom error docs, but my hosting company may. Doesn't the return code 200 rule out that an error doc would be returned?

This is driving me nuts. Sometimes the feed works fine:

65.214.**.151 - - [30/Mar/2006:00:54:07 -0800] "GET /feed/amazon/product/B000**1OCI HTTP/1.1" 200 6589 "-" "Bloglines/3.0-rho (http://www.bloglines.com; 2 subscribers)"
65.214.**.151 - - [30/Mar/2006:01:25:40 -0800] "GET /feed/amazon/product/B000**1OCI HTTP/1.1" 200 6589 "-" "Bloglines/3.0-rho (http://www.bloglines.com; 2 subscribers)"
65.214.**.151 - - [30/Mar/2006:01:58:13 -0800] "GET /feed/amazon/product/B000**1OCI HTTP/1.1" 200 316 "-" "Bloglines/3.0-rho (http://www.bloglines.com; 2 subscribers)" 

I'm guessing it may be some DOS protection thing instituted by my hosting company.

[edited by: jdMorgan at 6:29 pm (utc) on Mar. 30, 2006]
[edit reason] Obscured specifics. Please see TOS. [/edit]