I've been using Blogbridge as a feed reader for quite some time, at least since v2.something and it's been one of the first Java applications I've actually enjoyed using. Recently it's become increasingly slow, even hanging, on all of my computers, and I suspect it's due to the number of feeds and unread articles I have. Thats a problem that seems very hard to fix. I've tried unistalling, reinstalling, removing java, reinstalling java and so forth, but I always end up with the same results.
One of the best features of Blogbridge might actually be whats killing it. It has an online service that you can syncronize your feeds with, an excellent idea that lets you keep track of the same feeds spanning several computers as well as updating the read count as you go along. Fantastic feature, but it might very well be the feature that killed my Blogbridge enthusiasm at the same time. Since my unread count was pretty high, mostly due to a Digg feed and a few select Technorati feeds, the creeping slowness hit all my computers at once. That in turn makes it impossible for me to remove the feeds or even mark them all as read. So, there I am. Stuck on three seperate computers, all doing the Blogbridge syncronization dance and turning each other into a slow mess. Initially I blamed Java for all this, but it does seem like more of a Blogbridge issue than anything else.
Naturally, I started looking for a new feedreader, and found, Feedreader. Their website promises a free and lightweight reader, and that seems to be exactly what you get. Thankfully it also has opml support, so I was able to import my feeds from Blogbridge. After looking around a bit, I found that Blogbridge saves it's feeds locally in \documents and settings\username\.bb\final\backups, and after pointing Feedreader to that file all my feeds appeared in Feedreader. Naturally the read count was off, but there is not that much I could do about that.
After using Feedreader a bit, I have a couple of (small) issues with it:
Online Syncronization
Feedreader 3 doesn't offer the online syncronization service that Blogbridge does - Hopefully something like that will pop up in Feedreader too.No photo specific viewing setup
Blogbridge has a viewing mode that differs from your normal feed view, where it displays photo feeds in a special way. I want that in Feedreader too.
But, all in all, Feedreader 3 offers what it promises. It's snappy, works well and it's not made in Java. So far so good!
8 Comments so far
Aleksey Gureev, on September 20, 2006 at 8:52am, said:
Hi,
I'm the one behind the most BlogBridge programming. Indeed, handling long and fat feeds isn't at it's top performance right now. The problem is that we need to display the feed before doing something else with it and it becomes of a real challenge for a system when the number of articles is big. It takes lots of CPU cycles and hits the memory at the same time to render all of them. I have feeds with several hundreds of articles and it takes seconds for them to show up.
One thing I was thinking recently when I hit the same slowness is that we need to implement some smart paging, so that only the most recent X articles are displayed.
Hope we find some time for this soon. And hope to get you back!
Thanks for being our user for so long and thanks for sharing your experience.
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h0bbel, on September 20, 2006 at 9:24am, said:
I was seeing >300MB Ram usage, and 90% CPU usage. What happens then is that the whole Blogbridge application stalls, and there is nothing I can do to remedy it. If it had some kind of startup parameter, or other way, of overriding the unread feeds and set them all in a read state would help me get Blogbridge actually started again.
If these issues are fixed, I'll be sure to try it out again and probably switch back. As I said, it's really the first Java application I've ever enjoyed using, and the Blogbridge Service is excellent.
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Owen, on September 20, 2006 at 2:40pm, said:
I've been using GreatNews for a couple of months now, and find it useful for a simple reader. It has a few extra features that I haven't seen in other free aggregators, one in specific is that it can track comments on blogs that provide comment feeds by clicking "track comments" under the blog entry in the reader.
I don't think there is a feed syncronization system (it will sync with Bloglines, if that counts) but it does have a couple of different modes of display, which you can configure per-feed. Worth a look if you're still shopping around.
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h0bbel, on September 20, 2006 at 3:07pm, said:
That sounds very interesting. I'll have to give it a whirl as well, thanks Owen.
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Pito Salas, on September 26, 2006 at 12:20am, said:
We really'd like to understand the problem you're having. I've seen it myself on a slowish (1.5G) laptop with smallish (.5G) memory. But the key was that the wifi connection I was using was slow/intermittent. I think there's a connection with the perf probs that I was seeing.
Would you mind engaging in a quick email exchange to help us figure this out? Wha was your config? Thanks!
Pito (rps@blogbridge.com
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h0bbel, on September 26, 2006 at 12:35am, said:
I had this problem on three different computers, all of which has over 1GB of ram, and adequate CPUs (Two 3Ghz HT Intel boxes, and one Pentium M 2Ghz Laptop).
I've emailed you seperately.
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BlogBridge followup - h0bbel, on October 9, 2006 at 10:24am, said:
[...] A little while ago I gave up using BlogBridge, due to extreme resource utilization and general problems with it. The good developers behind the BlogBridge software responded quickly, and asked me to try out the weekly builds instead. I’ve been doing so for a week or so, and purposely just letting it sit in the background and not reading any of my feeds to make sure the unread count was high. Armed with the java debug console I tried reproducing the issues I was having with the 3.0.x version, and I’m very happy to report that the weekly build does not seem to suffer the same problems. I can finally go back to using BlogBridge as my primary feed reader, something I’m very happy about. [...]
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coComment - Site comments by h0bbel, on March 16, 2007 at 10:32am, said:
View this article on its blog
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