My ISP only gives me 30GB per month and I'm afraid I'll explode this number if I just let Particls run on its own all day long (it sucks more than 1GB/day). Before you find some time to work on improving this, do you have any suggestions? I don't like the idea of deleting sources too much... But shutting down Particls when I go away is pretty easy. How about a "stop all downloads" option in the menu (or green/red light toggle button)? Any other quick idea?

You could always try setting your refresh interval to an astronomical level to reduce the number of times it updates the feeds.

or you could try to find ways to combine multiple feeds into a single one

or you could get a real ISP

It's really a shame that Particls doesn't do any sort of caching or conditional GET-ing when retreiving feeds. (I just packet sniffed to check) Also, what's the deal with sending both a HEAD and a GET request? 

So the conditional 'GET'-ing is a HEAD request

If the server successfully handles the HEAD request, and the feed content hasn't changed, we shouldn't be re-downloading the feed data

ok, because (at least from what I was able to read in Etheral) it didn't look like you sent any headers for conditional requests. Maybe it was just because it hadn't checked those feeds since I restarted Particls 

So, there should be heavy downloads after a reset of the %appdata% directory (which includes the cache file), as long as Particls goes through my feedlist, but then there should be much fewer downloads, right?
If this is true, maybe I shouldn't stop Particls when I go to sleep and just let it finish going through all my feeds, in the hope that downloads will slow down later on?

Yes Francois - if you delete your appdata particls will do some heavy lifting to start with and then the bandwidth consumption will drop right down

so you think closing Particls at night is not useful?

When you are idle, Particls uses even less bandwidth

When you are idle, Particls begins shutting down it's content retrieval systems - especially CONDIS (The system that powers 'Automatically find information for me'

That being said - though - please be sure to monitor it's usage and ensure that it doesn't exceed your expectations

OK I'll keep checking. Still have 14 GB till end of month

Francois, there is also a couple of settings you can flick off to save you some more bandwidth (although you will be missing "features"):

(in settings and skins) these are:

 * Auto-subscriber = false

 * DownloadFavIcons = false

 * AdapterRefreshInterval = 3600

 * SafeFilterOnContentDiscovery = true

 * UseLocalImageCache = true 

OK, thanks, I'll change these if I get too close to the limit

I've already changed the SafeFilterOnContentDiscovery to false, eager to see what inappropriate content shows up

LOL

Looks like the last build (0.9.3275.0) consumes - for me at least - a lot less bandwidth than older versions, good good...

Excellent

see Francois, I always keep my promises

I never had doubts about that