WordPress MU

I'm developing an internal corporate news site that will feed to an internal corporate "portal" page via RSS.

My concern is that the RSS feed will not update frequently enough for this to be feasible to work as a mechanism for distributing corporate news updates and announcements. A 4 to 12 hour frequency just won't do.

So, the question is, is there a way to change the frequency of the rss feed updates, to something like every 15 minutes? or whenever a new post is made? (Other sites besides the "portal" page may pick up the feeds as well, so the solution needs to be part of the "news" site.)

Also, if there is a way to do this, what is the potential impact? And if we do this, would it be preferable to have this on a separate WPMU instance, rather than it being on a shared instance? (Is the RSS feed update frequency site-specific or is it WP-instance wide?)

Some of the IT folk are pushing to use one large WPMU instance, but my gut is telling me that the feed update schedule issue would require a separate instance of WPMU for the news site.

I saw a post about the Update Services plugin (http://premium.wpmudev.org/project/update-services) but that only allows me to target specific sites where there is a new post, correct?

Thanks!

Little lost here. Are we talking about feeds coming into a wpmu install or the ones that your wpmu install are creating? Also where are you seeing "4 to 12 hours"? I ask because the time period for reading in external feeds is 1 hour and those feeds that the wpmu install create are live and should be up to date.

It's the feeds that WPMU is creating. Much of the content on the portal page will be content pulled from WPMU feeds.

It has since been decided that we'll indeed have separate instances, so the traffic load won't be an issue, and we can tweak the install as needed to make sure the feeds are current.

We still need to make sure the feeds do stay current, and with caching on the network, that might be a challenge.

http://code.google.com/p/pubsubhubbub/

I'm still curious about the 4-12 hours they're seeing.

Probably a server issue. One setup I have on a vps, the whole box is delaying feeds. Haven't narrowed down why yet, as I think the box itself is dying anyway & I'm moving stuff off.

Thanks Andrea! I'll point the server team that direction.. :-)