How can you tell how much BANDWIDTH RSS Feeds are taking up, overall?

Question

I am considering pulling out RSS FEEDS from the default Outlook Mailbox configuration pushed to our users by Exchange. My two biggest reasons for doing this is that (1) I firmly believe that the majority of my users have NO CLUE what it is or how to use it and (2) those that DO know what it is may be having a negative impact on BANDWIDTH by the use of the RSS Feeds. I would like to know if there is a SIMPLE way to tell how much bandwidth the RSS Feeds (combined) are using? I know that it comes in over port 80, same as web traffic, which means that I could put a sniffer on the port then run the traffic through an analyzer...but note that I said SIMPLE. Thanks~~

Answer 1

You can check your log files. My log files show an RSS hit like this.

128.0.0.1 - - [01/Dec/2012:02:54:08 -0500] "GET /rss/feed.xml HTTP/1.0" 200 863 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Mail.RU_Bot/2.0)"

The size of that hit is logged in bytes: 863. So it would be a matter of adding up the size of all the hits of rss from your log file. Here is a command line that I can use to do so from my log files:

cat access_log | grep 'GET /rss' | sed -r 's/.*\" [0-9]{3} //g;s/ .*//g;'  | awk '{ sum+=$1} END {print sum}'