RSS Feed - why so many hits?

[philipp]

I put up a weblog (Google Blogoscoped) and now I'm getting around 60,000 requests on its XML RSS-Feed. It is now the most-requested document on this server and I was wondering, how exactly does this happen? I submitted to various blog-catalogs, so I suppose they somehow request the file every x minutes, or during every search or something?
Anybody can shed any light on this with more details?

[oilman]

Can you narrow down who is requesting the the feed? You may have a some abuse happening in there. I'd recommend a closer look at where the requests are coming from. There may be some IP banning that needs to be done.

[philipp]

My stats-system doesn't allow me to narrow it down (I'd have to do that on my own). But I'm sure many requests are natural, after all when I go to Daypop etc. they always have quite recent data about my feed. But around 60,000 weekly hits is still quite high for my site. Does anyone have a similar situation (RSS feed submitted to various blog-directories) and can tell me if this is normal?

[chiyo]

We get over 25,000 weekly hits to one RSS news feed. However its a news feed, not a blog feed.

Really it comes down to what scripts or programs people are using to access your feed. One person requesting your feed every 10 minutes is going to be 1,000 every week, so it doesnt take too long to add up. However, it is commonly accepted as gentlemanly practice that feeds should not be accessed more than once every 30 minutes, (except of course in the case of those that update every 10 mins like the BBC!), and that people should use caching as much as possible.

Then again, you may well get those number of hits from just one rogue program or script which has gone awry and is downloading every minute. There are so many RSS feed readers now and expanding all the time - desktop and web based. Then of coure anybody can downlaod your feed using any number of home grown scripts. We have had similar before and just banned the IP or contacted the server it was connecting from.

Seeing your feed is very new, I would guess that your problem is one person. However the title of your feed may make it very popular anyway.