Neil Turner's Blog

Just another WordPress site

I owe Movable Type an apology

Sometimes you should never jump to conclusions before looking at the evidence. I requested a list of scripts which were causing problems, and this was the result:

process count CPU secs CPU minutes
php 14871 5656.85s 94.28 CPU minutes
mt-postacomment 39 27.70s 0.46 CPU minutes
awstats.pl 8 11.20s 0.19 CPU minutes
imapd 55 8.81s 0.15 CPU minutes
mt-feed.cgi 8 7.00s 0.12 CPU minutes

So, as you can see, it’s not Movable Type’s comments after all – in 1 day, it was using a mere 30 seconds of CPU time, compared with an hour and a half for PHP. Now ‘php’ includes all PHP scripts on the site, which does include parts of Movable Type – namely the dynamically generated pages and the search results. But there are other scripts on here – my own tag search script and some bot-banning scripts. I have disabled these other scripts, and reduced the number of pages being served by dynamic publishing, to see if this makes any difference. Hopefully I will find out soon.
So this means I won’t be switching to WordPress right away. I will keep it on here for now, in case I want to take a look at it, but for now I’ll stick with Movable Type. I will re-enable comments, and I have brought over the entries and discussions from the temporary WordPress blog so that they’re here to view.

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2 Comments

  1. As with trying to find slowdowns in my programs, nothing beats cold hard data before attacking the real problem rather than the “obvious” one…
    Regards,
    Rob…

  2. No, it’s ok. I’ve found that MT is pretty much a steaming pile. WP can be considered a bit clunky as well, but not nearly that pita that MT is.