I recently wrote a tutorial on using SimplePie to parse your Google Reader shared items Atom feed (or any other RSS/Atom feed for that matter). However, after implementing it on this site (in the sidebar here) and testing it for a month-or-so, I’ve found page load times are very slow whenever SimplePie parses the feed and updates the cache. I had it set to request an update every hour (3600 seconds), which in hindsight is probably too often for my needs. (more…)