RSS/Atom feed too large

[TravisCardwell]

- Do you want to request a feature or report a bug?

Bug

- What is the current behavior?

The RSS/Atom feed currently contains 2,789 entries, taking about ~2.5MB. This causes the following undesired behavior:

• It takes RSS readers a relatively long time to download the feed each update.
• It takes RSS readers a relatively long time to parse the feed each update.
• It bloats the size of RSS reader data store.

By the way, I notice that the XML in the feed is not minimized, resulting in a feed that is larger (in bytes) than it needs to be. For an example of minimized XML, see the Lifehacker RSS feed.

- If the current behavior is a bug, please provide the steps to reproduce.

$ wget -O sm.xml https://www.smashingmagazine.com/feed/
...
$ ls -lh sm.xml 
-rw-r--r-- 1 tcard tcard 2.5M 12月  3 10:10 sm.xml
$ grep -o '<item>' sm.xml | wc -l
2789

- What is the expected behavior?

RSS/Atom feeds usually only contain a constant number of the most recent articles. For example, the Lifehacker RSS feed has the 25 most recent articles, resulting in a feed that is currently ~35KB in size:

$ wget -O lh.xml https://lifehacker.com/rss
....
$ ls -lh lh.xml
-rw-r--r-- 1 tcard tcard 35K 12月  3 10:19 lh.xml
$ grep -o '<item>' lh.xml | wc -l
25

- Please mention your operating system version and the version of your browser

This is a server-side issue: RSS/Atom feed generation is not well implemented.

[siliconforks]

Interesting - I was looking at the feed yesterday to check whether #264 was fixed, and at that time it only had the 50 most recent articles (which seemed like a reasonable amount); it must have just started doing this in the last day or so.

[TravisCardwell]

I update my feeds twice per day, and this morning was the first time that the feed contained so many entries for me, but I may have been using the old feed. (I removed the feed when it started causing issues, so I cannot check which one I was using. I will of course put the feed back once the issue is resolved, btw!)

50 entries sounds reasonable to me. Currently, that would contain entries from Customizing Admin Columns In WordPress (Fri, 01 Dec 2017 17:46:00 +0100) to Launching Your Design Career: Which Type Of Education Is Best For You? (Tue, 12 Sep 2017 21:47:40 +0000). Readers would not miss any articles even if they only update their feeds every 2.5 months.

[vitalyfriedman]

Thank you @TravisCardwell @siliconforks @lembitk — will be looking into it, definitely a bug that needs solving!

[siliconforks]

This bug was fixed for a while, but it seems to have returned today (Dec 11, 2017).

[Levdbas]

I have the same issue. Large RSS feed ocurring in my browser.