Movable Type (For Jag etc)

[Sara]

Just wondering how the servers are doing running Movable Type ?

I'm asking because it seems like a lot of hosts are banning MT these days for supposed overusage of resources. Are Jagpc seeing the same thing and if so, is there any plans disallowing MT?

*crossing fingers for MT being safe to use around here*

[JPC-Greg]

Im not really sure about this specific feature but Ill have a tech check into this thread for you and get some results. If its causing a problem I havent heard of it yet because we have not discussed discontinuing support for it.

[G.Bloke]

I'm intrigued. Any clues as to why MT might be overly resource intensive, say why it might place greater demands on a server than The Nuke family of products? I don't use MT or anything like it, nor do I have plans to use it. However MT would seem to be quite simple on the scale of PHP progs and given that I use custom scripts on my site I wonder if this is the start of a trend that may make a dynamic php-driven site only possible in a dedicated environment.

[Sara]

I'm not really sure. Have just noticed a trend at webhostingtalk.com (and the mt forums) that some users complain that MT have been banned. It's rare that they get any real reason from their host as to why.

Just wanted to touch ground with the jag people to hear if they see what those other hosts are claiming.

[Ron]

search the forums for "MT cgi" and you'll see previous complaints...

[Vin DSL]

Oh, gawd! This is all I need...

I'm running three Nuke sites on Neutron right now. Let me go check the server load...

bash-2.05a$ uptime
  1:12am  up 21 days, 10:31,  0 users,  load average: 0.05, 0.15, 0.16

End of conversation about Nuke being a resource hog, okay?

As far as bloggers go, a lot of mass webhosters pack each server with 1000's of clients. If everyone was running MT or Nuke, sure server load is going to suffer, but I don't think they do that here, so count your lucky stars...

I gotta run. Quit baiting me, okay?

[jkeller]

(For once, I'm going to reply to a thread that isn't just chit-chat... )

Sara (and anyone else interested), I have an MT site and I haven't had any problems. The source of a lot of complaints probably comes from MT's regeneration of pages. Each time you add an entry, it runs scripts to generate static pages. The same goes for when visitors add a comment, since it has to regenerate at least one, usually three or more, pages.

The problem is, many people love to load up their pages with neat little goodies. Some of these, notably the calendar, take more (computing) resources to create than others. For example, if someone adds a comment to a page that's listed on an archive, then MT regenerates the entry page as well as the entire archive page - which could have a lot of other entries, as well as a calendar of entries, etc.

If you've included a heavy resource element on every page and do a full-site generate (with a lot of entries), of course a user is going to hog a lot of resources. There are ways around the problems (like generating snippets to be included later in PHP or via SSI), but most bloggers aren't capable enough or interested enough in optimizing their page generation for this to be commonly seen.

I'm pretty impressed with the MT scripts' internal optimizations, but I could see how things could get out of hand. Worst case, if a blog spammer comes and hammers your site then he will chew up a lot of resources. Otherwise, you have a lot of control over your potential resource usags; it's just a question of how much time you take to weigh the benefits and effects of the tags you use.

Bottom line, an MT site is set of static pages - unless a page is being regenerated. If you add a lot of entries or have a lot of visitors making comments (especially on a page laden with MT tags), then the site becomes like any other dynamically generated one and takes up computing resources.

[Sara]

Thanks for that explanation. Kinda knew it but couldn't quite explain it that well (I'm a non tech kind of person). At least my current main install isn't loaded with plugins etc, though I am playing with a second install to use MT as a mini CMS for my whole site.

[JPC-Masood]

J. Keller has explained quite in detail what goes on with an MT install... the bottom line is that MT or any other script with heavy traffic can impact the server performance. Its a case by case scenario. We can not just ban one script or application. Even a badly coded low-traffic site can ruin the server.

MT is pretty common on our servers here and I have seen only one or two cases where it was taking up considerable resources. But that is either because the site was getting very big and generation of pages took a long time (daily cron job?), or the traffic on mt-comments.cgi was high.

In any case, we usually contact the site owner and move them to a less loaded server (usually new ones) or they can consider an upgrade to semi-dedicated (10 users per server, more resources available).

So keep on blogging

[Sara]

That's nice to know