Omer van Kloeten's .NET Zen

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Omer has been professionally developing applications over the past 8 years, both at the IDF’s IT corps and later at the Sela Technology Center, but has had the programming bug ever since he can remember himself.
As a senior developer at NuConomy, a leading web analytics and advertising startup, he leads a wide range of technologies for its flagship products.

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SharpReader

SharpReader's current version (0.9.5.1) has been out for a year and change now.

I know software rot when I smell it and this piece of software is growing fungi like nobody's business. As I am writing this, SharpReader takes up ~400MB of memory running on my computer while restarting it will only return it to its normal state of ~250MB of memory.

I've sent an email to Luke today asking him to either update the app or open it so that the community could update it. I really like this piece of software and don't want to replace it for something else.
Please help me with this and appeal to Luke yourselves using your weblog or email him (his address is in the Help->About box.)

Thank you.

Update: Luke emailed me back, saying that there's a new version in the works with some new features, but the memory issue will not be addressed at this time. Bummer.Update #2: Luke released 0.9.6.0. Go download it :)

Posted: Jul 25 2005, 10:44 PM by Omer van Kloeten | with 14 comment(s)
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Comments

Tom said:

I don't see your angle here, does it not do anything that you want it to do? I've used SharpReader for some time now and I've found it does everything I've wanted (It doesn't do podcasting but neither do most aggregators).

As far as memory, 400Mb really isn't that much these days, especially for the number of feeds that you must be checking.

I mean, I'm all for open sourcing free tools and if he wants to do it that's great, but I don't see why your trying to force him to do it.
# July 25, 2005 4:34 PM

Omer van Kloeten said:

Tom,

I use this app like many other people do. I really like using it and want to continue to do so.
There IS quite a list of things that need to be added to the application, like ATOM 1.0 support, etc. and I'm sure Luke has received countless emails regarding these issues.

As far as memory - I don't run a system bought yesterday - my system is one year old and has 512MB of memory.
At its peak, SharpReader will consume about 0.5GB of memory, half of which is taken from the RAM. When a single application takes up half of my RAM, that's an unhealthy situation.

I wouldn't want to force Luke into outing his code as much as I wouldn't want anyone to do the same to me.
This is simply an outcry to ask for a new version after the current one has existed for a year already. If he has abandoned this tool, he could just let the community upgrade it for its own sake.
# July 25, 2005 4:58 PM

Oskar Austegard said:

I too used SharpReader, and liked it a lot, but eventually grew tired of it. I switched to RSS Popper, another one-man show. This tool integrates into Outlook, which is great since it means my subscribed blog-posts are now searchable along with the rest of my email.
# July 25, 2005 5:05 PM

Rob said:


I had some of the same issues you did and I voted with my feet and moved to

http://www.rssbandit.org/

I thought SharpReader was good but RSS Bandit is great!
# July 25, 2005 5:56 PM

Rob said:


I had some of the same issues you did and I voted with my feet and moved to

http://www.rssbandit.org/

I thought SharpReader was good but RSS Bandit is great!
# July 25, 2005 5:57 PM

Rex said:

SharpReader was good, but the memory footprint is just ludicrous - noone should have to be forced to accept 500mb memory usage just for reading RSS feeds.

i went and bought newsgator....
# July 25, 2005 6:26 PM

jayson knight said:

Dump SharpReader and go with RSS Bandit. Or if you feel like dishing out a few bucks, FeedDemon can't be beat (it's written in C++, so memory issues are virtually null); I used it a while back and it's by far the quickest reader I've seen.
# July 25, 2005 6:57 PM

Tom said:

I actually thought you meant hard drive space, if its leaving a 500mb footprint...well...I don't know what to say. Maybe you should switch. For me, with my meager 200 feeds, I run at about 21mb.

Anway, I don't disagree with you (and I hated RSS Bandit so I'm all for open sourcing Sharpreader) I just didn't want it to be like everyone was ganging up on Luke.
# July 25, 2005 8:27 PM

jesse said:

I tried SharpReader, then RssBandit, without much happiness. FeedDemon was pretty nice, but Omea from JetBrains tops them all.
# July 25, 2005 9:03 PM

jayson knight said:

I had to give up on Omea; with a large number of subscriptions + a large database, it started to really slow down (I used it since the betas until about a month ago). Towards the end, it was taking close to a minute to spin up, the memory footprint was huge, and my db was close to 2 gigs. They say they've cleaned a lot of that up in 2.0 (which would be nice, it really was (feature wise) the best reader out there). I posted numerous times about it, just search my blog for omea.
# July 26, 2005 12:21 AM

Richard Tallent said:

SharpReader archives posts FOREVER, so with a blogroll of several hundred feeds, it can definitely suck up the RAM.

Here's what you do: scroll through and find feeds that have the most total postings, select, Ctrl-A, and Delete. Reload the app to see the difference. Repeat this housekeeping once every few months to keep it a little more RAM-friendly.

Frankly, I'd rather have an open-source ASP.NET reader running on my home machine over broadband so I can access it from any PC and have the same feeds, new items, flags, etc.

That said, I agree: it's sad that this app has been gathering cobwebs for so long. To Luke's credit, it's still best-of-breed IMHO, but so was IE6 a year after *it* came out...
# July 26, 2005 12:27 AM

Doug Moore said:

I would like to see a nice .NET reader that uses the Bloglines API.
# July 26, 2005 9:37 AM

Luke Hutteman said:

> SharpReader archives posts FOREVER

No. Go to Tools|Options|Feed Properties, and change MaxAge to the maximum time you want to keep your posts before having SharpReader remove them automatically. This setting used to default to "None" (meaning articles would stay until you manually removed them), but this was changed in some "recent" version to 2 weeks. You can set it to anything you want though, and can similarly set the maximum number of items per feed to keep, and whether to always keep unread items or not.

To override this setting on a per-feed basis, select Tools|Feed Properties and select the feed for which you want to customize this setting.
# July 26, 2005 8:06 PM

Omer van Kloeten's .NET Zen said:

Luke just dropped his yearly update to SharpReader today. Since I last wrote about SharpReader, I've

# August 3, 2006 11:34 AM
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