RSS Traffic too heavy for MSDN!

Scoble reports that MSDN had to remove text from within its RSS feeds and make them lighter in order to cope with traffic generated via RSS.

RSS is broken, is what happened. It's not scalable when 10s of thousands of people start subscribing to thousands of separate RSS feeds and start pulling down those feeds every few minutes (default aggregator behavior is to pull down a feed every hour).



Bandwidth usage was growing faster than MSDN's ability to pay for, or keep up with, the bandwidth. Terrabytes of bandwidth were being used up by RSS.



So, they are trying to attack the problem by making the feeds lighter weight. I don't like the solution (I've unsubscribed from almost all weblogs.asp.net feeds because they no longer provide full text) but I understand the issues.



I know of a major broadcaster that refuses to turn on RSS feeds because of this issue too. We need smarter aggregators and better defaults.



I only pull down RSS feeds once per day -- right before I start reading my feeds.



But, clearly, RSS is losing some of its advantages. More and more sites are not providing full-text feeds. I can't fight this one alone.