Conclusion of the Feedburner latency test
Thursday, January 08, 2009 by Dave Winer.
It appears that it takes FB some amount of time to recognize a feed once its been registered, but that once it does, it's pretty close to perfect at caching a feed for 30 minutes before refreshing its copy from the original. 
A table that reports on the test.
Notes on the test when it started are here.
Here's the original feed and here's the Feedburner version.
I looked for docs on how to ping Feedburner, but came up with confusing and contradictory instructions, none of which worked. They all got Java errors from the server. I tried pinging using their form and through pingomatic, neither of which had any effect on the latency.
I tried adding a <ttl> element to the feed, set it to 1 minute to see if that had any effect. I'll let you know.
Update: Apparently Feedburner ignores <ttl>.
Update: I turned the test off for now. 
| Recent stories: |
"The protoblogger." - NY Times.
"The father of modern-day content distribution." - PC World.
One of BusinessWeek's 25 Most Influential People on the Web. "Helped popularize blogging, podcasting and RSS." - Time.
"The father of blogging and RSS." - BBC.
"RSS was born in 1997 out of the confluence of Dave Winer's 'Really Simple Syndication' technology, used to push out blog updates, and Netscape's 'Rich Site Summary', which allowed users to create custom Netscape home pages with regularly updated data flows." - Tim O'Reilly.
Dave Winer, 53, pioneered the development of weblogs, syndication (RSS), podcasting, outlining, and web content management software; former contributing editor at Wired Magazine, research fellow at Harvard Law School, entrepreneur, and investor in web media companies. A native New Yorker, he received a Master's in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin, a Bachelor's in Mathematics from Tulane University and currently lives in Berkeley, California.
Dave Winer 
My most recent trivia on Twitter.
