a blogging non-recommendation
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.
Comments
Even if you keep your junk comments and trackbacks under control (at Unfogged, we always tried to purge them at least weekly), spambots are wreaking havoc on a lot of MT installations. I thought it was just us but there are a number of people reporting getting shut down by their hosts because of mt-comments.cgi resource usage. (A couple of these problems were related to a change in how Typekey works under 3.2, but a lot, like ours, weren't.)
The problem seems to come from the way MT spawns a separate perl process every time it receives a request to publish a comment. We were getting thousands (sometimes tens of thousands) of spam comment requests a day, many of them even malformed and without an entry_id so they never were written to the site, but each spawned a process, using up server resources and getting us booted off of our shared server. I really have to wonder what the ratio of successful vs. unsuccessful spam messages is. If you're getting X spam messages written to your database and that's only a (in our experience small) percentage of the spam requests being sent to your site, how many perl processes are you spawning off over the course of the day? We finally reduced the number of requests that actually reach the server by modifying .htaccess but don't know if it's a permanent fix. I think the way MT is designed still leaves us vulnerable, should the spammers decide to get smarter.
That said, MT does also need to figure out a way to better handle large comment databases. We've had to move to backing up older comments to static pages because MT creaks under the size of our full comment database (~130,000 comments). Six Apart really needs to focus on scalability as their customers' sites get older and have larger and larger archives.
hi there:
just wanted to leave a quick comment to say I'm terribly sorry that MT has been causing problems for you and your friends. We really want to hear what our customers are having trouble with in regards to these sorts of issues so that we can troubleshoot and help out. Drop me an email if you'd like, and I can help you escalate the problem.
ginevra
six apart
I think we're mostly interested in avoiding an escalation of problems?
/bitch
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