Very interesting project. I gave up on the original gPodder port a long time ago due to the speed issues. I'm having not dissimilar issues in this newer version, but they've been brought up plenty of times earlier in the thread so the reasons are clearly known.
I'm currently using Videocenter for podcatching. It has a major bug in failing to rename some files after download, and now seems to be a dead project with no chance of being fixed. It would be fantastic to be done with it, although it did show promise for a while, and instead use a project that has clearly had some care and attention spent on it - gPodder.
I'd really like to use gPodder. It's much more geared toward audio content, but Videocenter does undeniably handle the RSS a lot faster.
I throw a lot at these applications, so seemingly have a harder time than many others writing here who seem to manage to use gPodder, something I haven't yet managed. I've imported 21 feeds. Most of them have sensible publishers that keep x number of episodes in the feed, but a few insist on retaining all episodes. One such is around the 850 show mark, another around 250. I guess these might be harder to deal with, but the new episodes seem to be at the top of the feeds. Are the whole feeds being parsed regardless of size? Do they need to be? I'm no expert on RSS. Does the mechanism use SAX or DOM style parsing? Is there a guarantee that new episodes will be at the top of feeds or could they be in any order?
Looking at the verbose output it appears that if a feed is unchanged no time is spent reviewing it, but otherwise the same processing that was required when first importing will be required again. Is this the case, because for this list of feeds that takes in excess of half an hour - perhaps longer, and i'd say maybe half of these feeds I subscribe to update daily. Videocenter takes about 5 minutes to do the same. I'm not sure how well it handles bad RSS, but it seems to manage these 21 well enough.
gPodder seems to reread some feeds that episode-wise haven't changed. I can only assume that they must have changed in some other way. Perhaps if somebody is pushing an unchanged XML file to their host every so often the change to a timestamp is enough to convince gPodder that it has changed. If that happens to be the 850 show feed, gPodder now checks each item. Even at 2-3 a second, this obviously still takes some time. Even if there is a new episode in the feed it still seems to need to read all 850 items before it can move on.
It was mentioned some further back in the thread that there was work to be done on the RSS, time permitting. Has progress been made on this? I ask from the standpoint of somebody that can't offer any help (beyond testing and suggesting I suppose) that would really like to use gPodder and get rid of Videocenter.
If anything I've said here is inaccurate then please let me know. I've only brought up so many specifics because they don't seem to have been discussed yet and they seem to be the main barrier to me being able to use gPodder successfully at the moment.