Quack, at Does It Echo? just upgraded to MT4.1 and in doing so he installed Temper - short for Template Profiler. It counts how long each template takes to rebuild when entries are published and outputs the times to your activity log - this means you can then single out any templates which are taking too long.

It turns out that 2 templates were taking over 10 seconds each to rebuild. One was a category archive feed, easily fixed by limiting it to the previous 15 entries, and the other was a block which outputted the 'recently commented on entries' code that appears throughout the site, which I've disabled for the time being. This has solved the timeout problem, although some other pages are taking up to 4 seconds to build - I'll investigate these later

But it now means that using MT is much more bearable and it means I have one less reason to switch away from it.

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.

It's very simple to install and integrates seamlessly into Movable Type. To authenticate comments, you just log in with your MT username and password, and each author on the system can use it.

Having my OpenID hosted 'in-house', as it were, means I have more control over it as I know exactly what data is stored; though of course, should my web site go down, I'll lose access to my OpenID too.

The upgrade wasn't without a hiccup - I originally installed it over the top of 4.01 (itself installed over the top of many other versions, including Betas) and upon finishing it didn't work. Installing to a new folder, and then copying my plugins over, seems to have done the trick, thankfully.

Anyway, it turns out that the update introduced a template change. Instead of doing this:

<MTOnThisDay>
<MTEntries>
...
</MTEntries>
</MTOnThisDay>

you just do this:

<MTOnThisDay>
...
</MTOnThisDay>

Keeping the <MTEntries/> tags in leads to some rather ugly recursion which is what you may have previously seen on the home page. It now looks as intended.

Incidentally I will be upgrading to the fully open source version of Movable Type 4.1, now that it is available.

Though there is no new version, MTLJPost has been re-enabled so cross-posting to LiveJournal has recommenced, which should be good news for those of you who choose to read this blog over there. Fast Search has also been updated so that it works again, which means you can use the lovely fast PHP search system and not MT's own CGI-based system which is terribly slow (but that's because I don't have fast_cgi or mod_perl on here to make it faster).

There are still issues with TypeKey signins, I believe - quite whether this is a lingering template issue or what I don't yet know, but I'll look into it more as and when I have time.

I'm aware of an issue before the update of TypeKey basically not working at all, and some people can't use their OpenID sign-ins here either, so I'll look into those and report any remaining issues to SIx Apart.

Update: Feh, would appear that TypeKey still isn't working.

Update II: Still not working, even on a newly-created test blog. Even more exasperatingly, some other people have got TypeKey working in MT4, so I'm unsure what the problem is. In any case, I've reported it to Six Apart so hopefully they'll be able to work something out.

I'm also trying to get to the bottom of the reason why I haven't been receiving comment notification emails. I've added the Mail::Sendmail Perl module in the hope that it'll kick it into life.

• Smilies are now working in entries and comments :) .
• I've fixed the issues with OpenID/TypeKey comments that appear when you preview your comment by updating the JavaScript used to MT4's version (and not a cannibalised version of the MT3 defaults like before)
• At my end, I'm not receiving email confirmation of comments when they're posted, even though I should be and did before the upgrade. Not quite sure what's up there. Update: Just received one, so either it's a fluke or they're magically working again.
• You may not be able to comment anonymously on some recent entries because the comment challenge box isn't there - that's because I forgot about it until late last night and didn't rebuild everything. Yes, I still use static pages for entries.
• The purpose of the sign-in link isn't very obvious - it doesn't make it clear from the outset that you can sign-in with OpenID or whatever. I'll fix this with some images.

I would have kept a shorter version of this as an addition to the previous entry, but Google Reader doesn't show updates to posts and so quite a number of you wouldn't see it. To be fair you're probably not interested anyway but nevermind.

MT4 is big - around 13.5 MB when unzipped - and on my 2 megabit connection took around half an hour to upload. Thankfully it's pretty easy after that as the upgrade is very simple, although as this is an early release quite a few plugins haven't been updated yet and so I've had to disable quite a few of them; though none of them are particularly big or important.

So, if you can read this then the upgrade was a success and most things are working. The interface is very different but I'm liking it so far.

Update: It's taken me a little while to get things working properly, mainly because of a MT template tag used in the wrong context on one of my custom templates (<$MTArchiveDate$> in the Entry template) which MT 3.x had no problems with but MT 4 seems to throw it's toys out of the pram over. To be honest it's not really MT's fault as the tag was in the wrong context, but it would be nice if this was told to me when the entry was saved. As it happens, it just said everything was okay and then didn't rebuild me pages for me, though thankfully I found out when doing a manual rebuild what the problem was.

Of the plugins I've had to disable, Fast Search is the one I'm going to miss the most - until it's updated for MT 4.x we're back to MT's default CGI-based search which is much slower. I've also had to disable the plugin which crossposts entries to LiveJournal for the time being - sorry LiveJournal people.

Other plugins which I've previously used have been folded into MT's core. OpenID Comments is now built-in, and so when you sign-in you'll have the option of using OpenID, TypeKey, LiveJournal or Vox to authenticate your comment. There's also the ability to add user accounts and so you'll be able to have your own account with this site in future if I enable the option, but as I've previously mentioned I'm sticking with allowing anonymous comments for the time being. Markdown and Smartypants are now built-in, as is SCode for providing image CAPTCHAs, although I'll still be using Comment Challenge which still seems to work okay in 4.0. Some plugins that are still enabled may or may not work, such as MT-Notifier which sends out the email notifications of new comments.

Rich text editing is now included, so you can format posts without having to use HTML, and it seems to work pretty well too - I'm using it for this post. In particular, adding images to entries is far easier than it used to be. There's also the ability to preview your entries as they would appear when posted (i.e. with your blog's design) and not just how the text will look.

I haven't had a lot of time to play with it, mainly because I've spent most of the evening retro-fitting my templates into the new software, but so far I'm really impressed.

Considering it's been over 10 months since I installed the plugin I'm impressed that it has taken until now for the automated bots to work around it - I thought that something so simple would be trivial to work around. Obviously it wasn't.

As it happens, only 4 spam comments got through, and they were all junked by other anti-spam plugins (namely Akismet and SpamLookup) so they never appeared on the site. But it's a slightly concerning new development.

So I'm trying out Six Apart's RebuildQueue plugin, which means that page rebuilds don't necessarily happen straight-away, but may be delayed for a few seconds. Though much of this site is dynamically generated, some parts are not and so hopefully this plugin will sort those aspects out.

Update: Scratch that - now the pages don't seem to rebuild at all. Back to normal now.

I also installed Subversion on my MacBook today, from source. It took a while, but seems to work.