I've known about the fact that Mylyn can trigger an OOM exception in Jira in one SOAP call to the Apache JIRA server; too many projects, too many users, and the O/X mapping code in Axis1.3 keels over.

What is new to me today is the fact that the tool is also resposible for 2TB/month of the traffic off eclipse.org. That is not a typo: Two Terabytes, 10% of the Eclipse bandwidth, that from site that offers a tool that weighs in at 100+MB before regular updates.

wow. Now there's a case about some assumptions in the client that don't transfer to the big OSS bug repositories.

What is interesting, though, is how the problems are fixed. Apache had to patch their JIRA server to block some of the calls, effectively disabling Mylyn against their site. The Eclipse team -whose bugzilla API was pure HTTP -created a (compressed) static rather than dynamically generated prettily-laid-out XML configuration file to serve up, then told the Mylyn people to do GET requests using If-Modified-Since headers. Because nothing scales better than cached content.