Hi --

 The openkapow servers seem to be suffering from a cache misconfiguration. I find that for most of my feeds, the servers are not caching the content at all. That is, if you call the feed, it takes several seconds to return the RSS (some of my robots are pretty complicated, and hit many links). In theory, if you then call the feed again, say, 60 seconds later, the response from the server should be almost instantaneous, because it has cached the feed. But, no, it again takes just as long on the second call -- whether thats 60 seconds later, 10 minutes later, or 30 minutes later, and no matter how long you've set the cache for in Robomaker.

 
Also, many other times the server will respond with a null page (i.e. XML of zero length, which is, of course, not legal XML). Or with a long list of java errors.

 
Here's a sample feed to try:

http://service.openkapow.com/OutQNews/sfchroniclegay.rss

These problems seem like cache misconfgs to me, but of course, they could be other problems with the servers, including just being way overburdened.

 Is there any way you could look into this?

Thanks,

TAC

 

First, there were some performance issues we ran into when we migrated the backend systems of openkapow to a new provider.  Those have been addressed and could have been causing this issue.

Second, caching is not guranteed.  The cache of RSS XML results are stored in a Java Caching System cache which is of limited size.  Therefore, the oldest cache entries will get removed as newer entries get cached.