Anyway, as my actual post content – I have mine set to 1 minute. The only feeds I check are recentchanges feeds to wikis, and there is usually something like at least one change every minute, and I like to know exactly how many changes I need to watch; perhaps people need to write more efficent code for generating their XMLs if they don’t want so much load on their servers. I’ve set up my wikis to cache the XML every minute, and to diff and create a file with only the last one or two changes anyway, so my update is only pulling a tiny XML file from the server.

Every five minutes? No way, that’s obnoxiously often. What feeds do you need to poll every five minutes for changes? Even quickly changing feeds like news sources really won’t meaningfully change more often than once an hour.

Be courteous and set your feed checking rate to at least an hour. In many cases, checking every 2 hours is fine.