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 (12) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)