I have been running into this lately with a few RSS feeds. The Office Zealot blogger Atom feed exceeds 500K in size. This is bigger than what my feed reader of choice, GreatNews, could handle. The current incarnation of the feed is 611,963 bytes and has entries going back to 11/24/2004. The MSDN Magazine RSS Feed is another big one. While I cannot read them all, I usually check the summary and have found many interesting tips in those places.
This is a problem with GreatNews, not with the Office Zealot feed. The limit was upped in the next dot release to 800K. Another example feed in the GreatNews forums:
is 5 megabytes in size and contains all the entries in the DevExpress knowledge base!
Since there really is no documented standard practice for size of RSS/Atom feeds, this is acceptable. There is no upper limit in the spec for the number of items or size of any item. But, hundres of items are not typical. Commonly, an RSS feed has just the latest 10-20 entries, or the last week to month worth of news items. Most desktop aggregators are able to archive news items and commonly expect feeds in the size of 20,000 bytes or so. Web-based aggregators typically show the latest 10 items. So perhaps these sites should retain the latest 100-200 posts or so.
It is worth noting that the above example for Office Zealot means that they are being hit for a 1/2 megabyte bandwidth download for each RSS request. So for example, just my RSS Reader is hitting them for 12MB every day.
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