Feedzirra - A Ruby feed library built for speed - Paul Dix Explains Nothing

For a long time I have been disappointed in the Atom and RSS libraries available in Ruby. I always had some small issue like it wouldn't normalize the way I wanted it to, it wouldn't grab feeds the way I wanted it to, or it was just plain slow. So I set about creating yet another Ruby feed parsing library. The result of this effort is Feedzirra: a feed (Atom and RSS) fetching and parsing library for Ruby.

One of the primary goals of Feedzirra is speed. I wanted it to be able to fetch and parse many feeds quickly. Examples with libraries that show getting a single feed are great, but I'm going to be using it to get thousands. With that in mind I spent time looking for the fastest way to parse feeds (nokogiri and libxml) and the fastest way to get feeds (taf2-curb and libcurl). I also built in logic for updating feeds that speeds things up even more, saves on bandwidth costs, and makes it dead simple to see what's new in an updated feed.