Friendlier commafeed.feed-refresh.interval

[mnot]

commafeed.feed-refresh.interval has a default value of five minutes.

I'm seeing more and more people setting up personal instances of commafeed and keeping them running, making lots of useless requests against servers.

Can you please change the default to something friendlier, e.g., 1 hour? That's still quite often.

[Athou]

There are feeds that actually benefit from a quick refresh interval because they publish very often (news websites, reddit, ...). I didn't think this was an issue because CommaFeed supports conditional requests.

I've been thinking for a while about setting the default value of commafeed.feed-refresh.interval-empirical to true though. It's enabled on commafeed.com and it works great. Now's probably the time. I should also make the maximum refresh interval configurable, it's currently hardcoded to 24h.

[mnot]

That would be an improvement. Another thing to consider would be using HTTP caching information (e.g., Cache-Control: max-age) when available; that would give an indication of the site's preferences.

[Athou]

Support for the Cache-Control header has been added recently in 5.3.5. The Retry-After header is also supported since 5.5.0 😊

[mnot]

Oh, excellent. If that takes precedence over commafeed.feed-refresh.interval then I suspect the requests I'm seeing are from older versions...

[Athou]

If that takes precedence over commafeed.feed-refresh.interval

It does!

I moved a bunch of hardcoded values to the configuration in 469420b and I changed the default value of commafeed.feed-refresh.interval-empirical in 99c973c.