Not Even Breathing Hard

Front Line Voices had a pretty good first day: around 14,000 visitors and 35,000 page views. Which produced no signs of strain on the server, even though it's only a little Celeron box.

Which is as it should be, given the architecture of Movable Type. MT is strongly biased in favour of fast, low overhead reading, whereas the writing - adding new posts, and, unfortunately, leaving comments - can be very CPU intensive.

If you've noticed that leaving comments on MT-based blogs is rather slow, this is why: when you leave a comment, MT is forced to rebuild any pages containing the post that you are commenting on, which may include the main index, an individual archive entry, a category archive (which can get quite large), and one or more date-based archives (daily, weekly, monthly). Even if the only change to those pages is to say "3 comments" instead of "2 comments", MT needs to pull all the appropriate entries from its database, and reprocess those entries according to their respective templates (which amount to a complete programming language). It doesn't help that MT is written in Perl (not the fastest language in which to do this sort of thing) and is a CGI application (so none of this can happen in the background).

On the other hand, it handles 35,000 page views in a day with perfect aplomb.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:54 PM

Comments

1 I wondered why the comments took so long, now I know.

And now I'll be waiting here a minute.

Posted by: Jennifer at October 03, 2003 03:49 AM (E9paH)

2 Wow! Not only was that really interesting, but I understood it! (well, except for the CGI application part, but hey! you didn't loose me 'til the last sentence, so, hurray!)

Posted by: Susie at October 03, 2003 06:12 AM (0+cMc)

3 I wonder: When I go to, oh, say, nicedoggie.net and read the comments; if there are 12 comments I can scroll right through them, but if there 112 comments it takes a real long time to scroll down to the bottom. Is it me, or is it MT?

Posted by: Tuning Spork at October 03, 2003 10:17 AM (0Ox0d)

4 Uh, that's just you, Spork.

Doesn't happen to anyone else.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at October 03, 2003 02:24 PM (LBXBY)

5 Dang, and Spork had me convinced it was a conspiracy.

Posted by: Ted at October 03, 2003 09:40 PM (bov8n)

6 Dang. I gotta get me some DSL.

Posted by: Tuning Spork at October 04, 2003 08:53 AM (YLs7C)

7 A good traveler has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving.

Posted by: Horwitz Russell
at October 01, 2004 11:07 AM (VzFQ9)

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