I've had related hard experiences with unsubscribing as well. You'd expect
unsubscribing to be really easy, but in fact it's problematic and it's one
of the areas I've had a lot of trouble with. Every day I get about 25K pings
for updates from feeds that I have tried to un-subscribe from,
unsuccessfully. It's an unnecessary cost to me and to the hub. But let me
explain why unsubscribing can get complicated:
1. Bugs: PSHB is a distributed system with different implementations and
bugs happen. I've seen a lot of cases of unsubscribe requests returning an
error, which means I get stuck with that subscription until the renewal
date. Also, I suspect (haven't tested it) that some hubs don't renew the
subscriptions periodically, but rather keep you subscribed until you
explicitly unsubscribe. Which is a problem if the unsubscribe call fails.
2. Sometimes you delete (or lose) your own records of the subscriptions, and
then you have no way to unsubscribe. Because to unsubscribe, you need to
send the topic and callback urls to the right hub. And if you have lost that
data, then you can't unsubscribe. And the updates you receive from the hub
don't include that data. You can embed the hub and topic urls in the
callback url, but then some hubs seem to have trouble handling long callback
URLs.
The subscription renwal system is good, but even when it works, you
still receive updates for up to a month (or more?) before you get the chance
to tell the hub to stop. What if?:
1. The subscriber can simply return a special response (404, or some other
code) when it receives an update and that signals to the hub that the
subscription is not needed anymore. That would offer me another way to
unsubscribe without waiting until the renewal date.
2. It would be really helpful if the hub sends the topic and hub url along
with every update so that the subscriber can tell who's sending the request
and for what topic. It removes the need to encode that data in the callback
url.
Waleed
On Mon, Aug 30, 2010 at 12:55 AM, Andreas Thorstensson
<[email protected]>wrote:
> I am already doing this, but I find the method to slow.
>
> The problem is that with both subscription to the Firehose and those
> 10 million feeds, the updates seem to be throttled. Basically I am not
> getting the full Firehose. I tested this by having the callback to
> another IP and then it works.
>
> On Aug 29, 11:06 pm, Brett Slatkin <[email protected]> wrote:
> > See this thread:
> >
> > http://groups.google.com/group/pubsubhubbub/browse_thread/thread/7bfe...
> >
> > On Sun, Aug 29, 2010 at 2:28 AM, Andreas Thorstensson
> >
> > <[email protected]> wrote:
> > > Is there any way to unsubscribe all subscriptions to a certain
> > > callback URL?
> >
> > > Before Google Buzz released their firehose I subscribed to 10 million
> > > feeds, and now I want to unsubscribe them all.
> >
> >
>
