Saturday, January 29, 2005

OK RSS Bandit is starting to grate on my nerves

It's just not threaded properly. It can't be.

I noticed long ago that it uses worker threads to update feeds, and often when a feed fails to update, that worker thread (most likely a pool thread) becomes a zombie. Over time, this further degrades performance until the pool just runs out of available threads (not to mention the memory consumption is just insane by then). The only remedy is to shut down the program completely and restart it... giving you a day or two before having to kill it again.

And now this - I have noticed what can only be described as "anomalies" in my downloaded feeds before... things like seeing comments attached to the wrong posts, and so on. I always assumed this was just due to bugs in the RSS feed producer I was subscribed to. But today, on a pair of blogs, both had a post with a title of "{...}". Each had a jumble of intermixed text from recent posts in the other blog. In order to get the feeds sorted out properly, I had to delete them from my opml, restart RSS Bandit, and add them back. And of course, there are no posts on either blog titled "{...}".

I suppose the corrupted posts could be due to buggy local storage code, but it sure looks a whole lot like the updater threads are just poorly monitored and synchronized.

I guess it's time to try NewsGator. I am not thrilled about packing my RSS feeds into Outlook, but guess I will get used to it.

At least they have a free trial period though. I hate paying for something and tossing it out shortly after.

 

Sunday, January 30, 2005 10:25:30 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)
Hey Keith, RSSBanidt is an open source project. Maybe you should submit this as a bug and see if you can help sort it out. NewGator is going to have bugs, too. All software has bugs, you know this. I have the same troubles with RSSBandit. Incidentally, I didn't start seeing the odd "(...)" bug until people started upgrading to dasBlog 1.7. I'm still not convinced that it's RSSBandit causing it. Remember, RSSBandit caches the last entries it got from a feed. I've noticed that it fixes these "(...)" after the next feed refresh. I have to kill my RSSBandit every day, but I do it because I'm hibernating my laptop.

I hope you'll at least consider letting Dare know about the troubles by submitting a bug report.

http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=96589&atid=615248
Sunday, January 30, 2005 3:09:33 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)
*sigh*

yes, of course you are right. I was just frustrated and annoyed, it had been building for a while and the "{...}" posts pushed me over the edge. The having to kill RSSB regularly is especially annoying to me, as I keep my machine up all the time, and once it starts choking it has a negative impact on performance in my development virtual machine.

I really am displeased with newsgator already. There is no way to view comments without actually visiting the blog's site. I find that extremely counterproductive.
Sunday, January 30, 2005 10:48:05 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)
I was quick to comment because I, too have cursed RSSBandit a lot recently. ;)

I'm not willing to look at the code, so I thought maybe I could convince you to do it. :)
Thursday, February 03, 2005 2:45:56 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)
I also had problems with RSSBandit - so I moved to Omea Reader from JetBrains (www.jetbrains.com). The product is free if you download it and e-mail for a license key by March.

What I like about Omea that NewsGator didn't seem to offer is a comment count AND the ability to integrate newgroups and feeds. In fact, they have the concept of "WorkSpaces" - group your newsgroups and xml feeds by topic (like Mobility, Tablet, Fun Stuff, etc) and you can read through your stuff faster. I love that feature. Finally, I like that you can create custom search views - say you want to know about WSE. Create a search for WSE and any new post will automatically pop into that search view as well as whatever workspace you've got the blog sorted into.

-- Matt Ranlett
Thursday, September 01, 2005 12:55:07 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)
Hello!I found here a plenty of useful information for myself! I will visit you soon...
Friday, September 02, 2005 1:18:55 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)
OK seems to work now with this information
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