Ktn

The first RSS/ATOM aggregator I’ll talk about is RSS Bandit which looks really good but has a big problem, it uses the .NET framework.

It has for sure a lot of good points, but you’ll see that my requirements are perhaps so extreme or beyond the edge that this application isn’t good for me, or better said, for my machine.

The look and feel are just excellent, I must say; the way the buttons to add a new feed are placed and designed is very good, the easy it is to add a new folder/category to place the new feed in there is awesome, the icons are good, the “Feed Errors” special feed is something that provides an easy way for geeky people to go and look why some feeds are failing.

The reading pane has a good design by default. The pane that shows the list of entries is quite good, but the default colors didn’t worked for me, I had to modify something in there, I think I reduced the font size and modified the color of the entries not yet read to blue, something like that, I may not recall what I really changed. The missing thing there is that it does not have the functionality to differentiate new unread posts (those retrieved in the last check of the feed) from the old unread posts, that’s something that Thunderbird does pretty good.

The bad points
Almost all of the bad things about the tool are because of the .NET framework, so maybe there’s no much the developers of this great tool can do.

I’ll start with the only missing option that doesn’t have to do with .NET, and it is that when selecting a given feed it has to show you always all of the posts of that feed, this causes a huge issue because of the .NET which I’ll explain later. I wish it to have an option that allow me to specify to not show any post when selecting a feed in the “Feed Subscriptions” pane, or to show me the last one or the one that was previously selected or perhaps the last 10, 20, 50, or whatever my preference is.

Now I’m going to talk about why the .NET framework is hurting this tool so much. First of all, I should say that I gave the opportunity to this tool to demonstrate that it can handle the massive amount of feeds that I need to track, and with the huge amount of postings that it gets everyday.

Right now I’m tracking 102 feeds on RSS Bandit and I may have something near the 81,000 or more entries in total. I know that at least a couple of feeds are closed, some have perhaps 1 post per month, others several per week, and some feeds (like the one for the IBM internal blogs) have several hundred per day.

Now you can imagine what do I need, and I have to say that .NET can’t handle it and looks like it will never be able to handle all of this. When selecting a feed, RSS Bandit gets unresponsive, I can’t do anything with it, and since the .NET comes from the Windows OS (I’ve XP installed) most of the times the task bar and everything is unresponsive. It doesn’t happen only when selecting a feed, it also happens when clicking on a menu option, a button, anything!!

When the above happens RSS Bandit consumes up to 366 MB of memory and the 99% of the CPU, something for about 2 or 3 seconds and often 7, 20, 30 seconds up to 3 minutes! And now that it is “idle” its memory usage is 356 MB !! Worst than Java I should say.

As you can see, .NET killed RSS Bandit from my point of view. It makes it require a machine with a processor of at least 50 GHz (the machine where I have it installed is a ThinkPad T41 with a Pentium M at 1.7 GHz and 1 GB of RAM) and at least 2 GB of RAM.

According to RSS Bandit’s page I have installed the latest version (1.3.0.42), this tells me that I won’t see any improvement in the tweak of .NET (if at all possible) in a long time. Perhaps the fastest way is to rewrite it in python or something like that?

Before I forget I’ll mention in here that RSS Bandit is using 73 MB to store the posts for all of the entries. I can’t say if that’s good or bad right now since I haven’t verified some of the other aggregators I’m reviewing.

Time to get rid of it !