I've been fiddling a bit with the (Atom) recent changes feed at
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Recentchanges&feed=a…atom.
I'm interested in whether a tool like
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:CryptoDerk/CDVF could use the feed,
so that the diff for each edit could be quickly viewed inside the tool, rather
than linked to externally.
It seems though that the combination of the default window size (50)
and the apparent refresh rate of the feed in the cache (about 20
seconds) means that there are changes that will fall through the gap
once you have more than about ~2.5 changes a second (which seems to
happen fairly often now). This means right now it's not really usable
in a tool like CDVF (and perhaps not usable in general).
What are the future plans for this feed? Can it (will it) be feasibly
maintained in a useful state as the edit rate grows further? No doubt
there are several approaches that could be taken (steadily increase
window size, refresh cache more often, split feed out into namespaces,
...), but all involve placing greater load on the server.
Adrian