akregator blog

The new and configurable archive makes progress - a few days ago I merged it to CVS HEAD. Now we use metakit and load article content only when needed, not everything on startup as it was before.
The old and dumb archive simply stored articles as RSS and parsed and loaded everything into memory on startup. You probably say “Oh my!”, and you’re right. Well, checkout CVS HEAD and feel the speed. Berkus has measured the startup times for his ~31000 articles archive, and the improvement is quite impressive: From 45 seconds down to 2.6 seconds. Also, memory usage should be reduced significantly (I don’t have exact figures here though).

The new plugin-based architecture also makes it easy to support other archive backends, for instance it should be rather easy to support DB servers like Postgres, or synchronize feeds with an archive repository on the web. The latter would be a good way to share your feed archive between Akregator installations, it would be even possible to code an Akregator web frontend to access your feeds from any machine (volunteers are welcome ).

So if you’re annoyed by startup times, be a brave man or woman and give CVS HEAD a try