I’m glad to be able to say: Mission complete!
Well, it’s a bit like having George W. Bush say that…heh. Almost all areas of the blog are now updated and working following the recent upgrade from Movable Type 3.2 to Movable Type 3.34 and to FastCGI— but not quite all.
I learned something about Movable Type operating under FastCGI: MT is loaded in memory and run from there rather than called from the hard drive repeatedly. This makes MT operate much faster (14 -15 times faster) — but unfortunately, it’s loaded with all the configuration settings, apparently. This means that any changes to the plugins installed to MT will not appear for several hours at least, or until MT is once more loaded into memory. Movable Type is notorious about making significant changes to their system every ‘.1’ upgrade, and invariably such changes will cause plugins previously designed by others to fail or else conflict with the new MT core or with other plugins installed on the system.
Over two years with Movable Type, beginning with Phatic Communion, I’ve installed a lot of plugins to the system, even quite a few I no longer use. The templates for D5GW were designed with some plugins in mind; other plugins configured the MT interface to add features for the contributors of D5GW, such as cross-post links. With every MT upgrade, the templates have to be rebuilt, but I couldn’t do that until I either deleted plugins or updated them to be compatible with the new version of MT. Updates to plugins occasionally require revising template tags that come with those plugins.
But using FastCGI meant that any changes to plugins whatsoever wouldn’t take effect for hours! Of course, I did not realize this for the first day or two, or understand it. So I spent hours changing the plugins, then I spent hours wondering why nothing was working the way it ought to work! (Searching through forums and blog posts, going into CPanel and checking that files were present and installed in the correct place — or deleted, in the case of old plugins…Sending email after email to my host LivingDot…)
To make a very long story a little shorter: I’m not 100% sure even now that things are configured optimally. Commenting and trackbacks should now be functional. However,
- In testing comments, I’ve noticed that comments on very old entries may publish, but the visitor is sent to either a 404 Not Found page or a blank page after the comment is saved!
- Additionally, comments to older posts seem to take much longer to save regardless of where the commenter is sent after it is saved.
I’m not certain why this occurs. All test comments I’ve made to newer posts seem to publish quickly without errors.
I’ve also had trouble rebuilding the archive pages from the batch-rebuild interface for MT. I had to reduce the number of individual entries built at one time from 40 to 10 just to get through the process here at D5GW — and, the process still ended on an error page with the rebuild of Phatic Communion. At PC, I kept hitting “refresh” on my browser every time this happened, and the process would pick up where it had left off; so I finally got through it. Toward the end of the process, the rebuilds picked up speed and finished without a hitch (for the last 100 posts or so on PC). I checked my CPanel stats and discovered that a spammer had been trying to leave comments during that time. So I suspect that excessive server load — the problem that started this upgrade process originally — may have caused the normal operation of MT to lock up.
Unfortunately, at PC I’ve not yet been able to complete the rebuild process for the monthly and category archives, although I’ve managed to rebuild most of them and have rebuilt all of the individual post pages. D5GW, with fewer posts and archives, has been completely rebuilt with relatively little hassle (during the rebuild, that is.) I am considering revising how the category and monthly archives are designed, to limit the amount of data that must be updated every time a new post is made: particularly, which plugins are used on those pages, since each plugin is another process MT must run for every page rebuild. Perhaps that would help in cutting down on server load.
For now, I’ll call it “Mission Accomplished!” and revise the definitions of those two words as appropriate! I apologize to our readers for the long delay, and hope for a little patience as new bugs are found.
Update Er, no. Had to make a final edit to a plugin eating up too much server time — MTPaginate — or, that is, delete it. System will reconfigure eventually, noticing that it is gone. I hope. Because I can’t edit templates or much of anything else until it does. (I couldn’t even post this entry, for the longest time, until the system reloaded; plus, this entry appears to have no individual archive page.) I’m going to need to redesign the monthly and category archive templates after all, since they use the pagination plugin; and I can’t do that until the system realizes the plugin is no longer installed. Sigh.
Update #2: Plugins have updated, templates have been redesigned, archives have been rebuilt, and everything seems to be back on track and working now.
I may still have to redesign the archives at some point, because the more information included per post, and the more plugin activity for each post, on each of the archive pages (monthly and category, and hopefully soon, author archives), the longer the system takes to rebuild archives to show an updated comment count. Each new comment also causes a rebuild of the main page of D5GW and the individual post page, as well as the index I php include on these pages in order to show the most recent comments. These processes can eat up server memory — and may have been behind the problem I had originally. But I have eliminated the pagination plugin on the archive pages, which undoubtedly took a lot of processing power.
Comment spam which isn’t published shouldn’t cause these things to occur; so I’m rethinking how the archives work on D5GW (and PC.) I hardly ever use them anyway, and don’t see much use of them by visitors; so I’m tempted to list only titles on the archive pages linking to individual posts, rather than all the info I now include.
If this update to the above post saves properly, then everything should be in order, finally.
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