BTD, Unfogged, Kriston — all have been having trouble with their Movable Type 3.2 installations. The culprit in all cases seems to be an overabundance of comments and trackbacks in the junk folders — for some reason these continue to be indexed as part of day-to-day MT operations. Eventually the load gets too large, scripts start timing out, and shared hosting providers shut you down for consuming too many resources. Maybe it's just a coincidence, but I'm not convinced — assuming a constant level of spam, these breakdowns have all occurred very close to one another. It looks to me like an inevitable shortcoming of MT 3.2 is surfacing.

From what I hear, SixApart hasn't been very helpful — despite these folks owning licenses. I'm sure this new Vox thing is going to be very cool, but they probably ought to spend some time fixing their existing flagship product, too. It seems to be breaking in a fairly serious way.

For those MT users who haven't crashed yet, all I can suggest is that you delete everything from your junk comment and trackback folders. That hasn't been a cure-all for everybody, but it can't hurt.

UPDATE: Check out the comments for more detail from Becks on the problems Unfogged ran into. Spawning lots of individual Perl processes isn't necessarily a bad thing (or avoidable, given MT's overall architecture), but the scripts clearly need to be made lower-impact — at least until the submission is definitively identified as non-junk (at which point resource consumption can be escalated).

Meanwhile, WordPress, MT's chief rival, continues to not-quite-intrigue me. I like that it's in PHP and that it's open source. But it's not capable of handling load in its default configuration, and it's been built with a nasty coding approach that, while intended to make template designers' lives easier, mostly just infuriates me with its quirkiness, opacity and illogical nature.

Gizmodo has a hands-on with the Sidekick 3, which apparently will be unleashed on T-Mobile customers in 8 days. Perhaps it's just the Gizmodo reviewer's lack of familiarity with the SK platform at work, but I find this piece somewhat discouraging. Yes, there's Bluetooth, an audio player and a slightly better camera, but large parts of this review read exactly like the author is talking about the Sidekick 2:

Little notifier icons in the top right corner inform you when you have a message in IM, mail, or SMS/MMS. Messages appear in a little bubble for a moment before disappearing, so you can assess the value of emails and messages before reading. There is an airplane mode that turns off the wireless and basically lets you browse your mail like a madman but little else.

The trackball is a real winner. It lights up with all the colors of the rainbow—actually about 10...

The battery lasted one full day....

Voice quality was fine and reception as about as good as can be expected. One pet peeve—it would lose its GPRS connection and only a full reboot would get it back...

Ah well. I think the GPRS speeds have been bumped up, too. If that's the case, it's probably enough of a reason to upgrade (the Bluetooth is the main attraction for me). Still, I was hoping for better battery life... maybe even... GPS? I know, I know, I'm asking too much.