Presently I am batching 5-10 feeds to download in batches of threads from Ruby using FeedZirra (https://github.com/pauldix/feedzirra) and then parse.

Has anyone been in a similar situation and done something particularly innovative they care to share? I plan on ranking feeds by frequency of updates after some analysis, but in the mean time I am resigned to pulling everything down in as quick a time as possible.

I would love to use Superfeedr for this, but cost is prohibitive for me and I do not want to stump up the cash to pay for the credits whilst in development (although I could move to this in the future).

Not so bothered about the technology/language - this is a hodgepodge of Ruby, Ramaze, MySQL, Solr and good old file system storage.

Advanced thanks and appreciation of any and all comments!