Org feed is great for my feeds reading. Sometimes though feeds are unresponsive. If you use the default retrieve method of org-feed you have just to wait ten seconds for feed.

The default method is rather slow though, so I preferred the good old wget utility.

Setting

(setq org-feed-retrieve-method 'wget)

will use the default retry policy of wget for each feed (which means hanging for a long time).

Org-feed is very malleable though, so this will solve the issue:

(setq org-feed-retrieve-method
      (lambda (url)
        (message "%S" url)
        (ignore-errors (kill-buffer org-feed-buffer))
        (call-process "wget" nil org-feed-buffer nil "-q" "--tries=2" "--timeout=3" "-O" "-" url)
        org-feed-buffer))

In practice we are just adding two flags to wget:

• --timeout=3: after 3 seconds of hanging close the connection
• --tries=2: retry at most 2 times

This speed up my feeds gathering quite a lot.

Hopefully it helps somebody else.