Pair.com and MT comments...
After a large number of protests from users of this site, I'm going to have to open up my comments-related problems to the floor. But first things first, I want to talk really briefly about pair.com - a hosting organisation that I honestly can't say enough nice things about. They're reasonably priced, helpful and have been genuinely reliable over the last few years. I've still got the Barbelith Underground running on a pair server, and with remarkably few problems... But there has been one thing that they haven't been particularly ideal for: hosting Movable Type based sites.
In fact, my problems with running Movable Type on Pair kept me using Blogger for about a year longer than I'd expected. Pair have this kind of time-out running on cgi-processes that effectively means that (unless you know to run everything through cgiwrap) any decent-sized MT operation (say saving a new post) may cause the system to throw a wobbly. And you can forget importing large number of posts from other systems. I had months of trouble with that.
I want to make it clear that once I did install the site through cgiwrap, I didn't have any trouble - so in a sense my only gripe is that Pair are different enough from other hosts in the world to require you to go through a different installation process. I can't exactly blame them for that. And other people's experience of their hosting may vary from mine, of course...
Anyway - back to my problem. I've got MT running cheerfully on Pair's servers now. It's all very smooth - except in one particularly difficult area. Everyone who uses my site realises quite quickly that I've got a problem with comments. In fact, often when someone attempts to post a comment to the site, they get returned a Server 500 error. In fact normally the comments have been saved and it's just the weblog page that isn't rebuilt. But people don't tend to realise this, so there's routine multiple-posting. It's profoundly annoying. Does anyone have any brilliant ideas about how I could fix this problem. Is it something that I can do to make it less likely to happen? Or do I need to go and attack Pair with pinking shears?
Comments
Please stay on-topic, informative and polite. I reserve the right to remove comments for whatever vague capricious reasons seem reasonable at the time.
Hmmm, I have the same problem, and I'm using Dreamhost which is actually the MT recommended host. Joi Ito has mentioned similar problems with trackbacks.
Are you using the default Berkeley DB? I think it might be a big part of the problem, but so far I've been too lazy to switch to MySQL. DailyKos a high traffic political blog that routinely has multiple 100+ post treads had similar issues that were mostly solved by switching to MySQL.
The other side of the problem is in the MT templates themselves. I use MT-RSS Feed, which transforms RSS feeds back into html links. When some of those RSS feeds are broken the probability of getting those 500 error increases dramatically. In fact I don't think I've gotten a single one since I cleaned out the bad feeds. Perhaps there is something in your templates slowing things down?
→ Posted by: William Blaze at May 23, 2003 12:38 AM
Interesting, just got the 500 error and an indication of the comment shows up on the main page but doesn't actually show up when you click.
Are you getting these errors when rebuilding normally? Seems like the problem might be in the actual comment template.
→ Posted by: William Blaze at May 23, 2003 12:42 AM
One last thought, it seems like the BCC On This Day, is the only thing different between the comments and the main pages, perhaps its the cause of your troubles? PS. the Remember personal info doesn't appear to be working.
→ Posted by: William Blaze at May 23, 2003 12:48 AM
Pair told me immediately upon signing up years ago all about using cgi-wrap and how the reapers work. Did they leave you hanging? That's a pity. I've read recently (last six months or so) that they've decreased the terrifying efficiency of the reaper bots, allowing more RAM & CPU time for processes, though. A glance at the MT user forums turns up many, many mentions of 500 errors on all sorts of hosts; I don't get them on my (much much much lower volume) MT setup at all so I don't think they're pair-specific.
→ Posted by: brian w at May 23, 2003 1:04 AM
Give the mySQL version a try. The first time I used MT I was using the berkly DB version and gave up when I ran into similar problems. When they released the mySQL version I gave it a go and havn't had any trouble since. Of course your milage may vary.
→ Posted by: alan at May 23, 2003 3:49 AM
I had similar problems last August shortly after upgrading my account with pair and moving to a different server. I was assured that it had nothing to do with the server I'd been moved to, and that my scripts were being killed by the reaper because they were using too much memory. Running them under cgiwrap was one option to solve the problem, but that same week pair was upgrading to FreeBSD 4.6 STABLE and support told me that would almost surely fix things. I never reinstalled under cgiwrap, and the errors did go away. I've also since switched to mySQL and am seeing even better performance. Pair has always been very responsive and I've never had a problem last more than a day or so, so I'm optimistic they'll get this sorted for you. Keep us posted.
→ Posted by: Mike at May 23, 2003 4:04 AM
If none of that works, perhaps you should bite the bullet and switch to different hosting for plasticbag? Zen are jolly good, although my current favourites are Xsession, who are quite small but have splendid features such as unlimited transfer bandwidth in their standard hosting package.
→ Posted by: Marcus at May 23, 2003 4:35 AM
It requires quite a bit of patching MT, but the very best thing you can do is install Sean Willson's rebuild type mod. It lets you say when to rebuild each index template: new entry, trackback, comment, or combinations. For instance, right now when a comment is saved, it rebuilds both of your RSS feeds, even though there's nothing comment related in them.
The other big thing you can do to speed things up and please the reaper is to avoid MTArchiveList like the plague. Especially without an archive-type, the way it is in the default "Master Archive List" template, it's the real killer of rebuilds, because the way it works right now (Ben's working on improving it) is to just merrily load up every single entry into memory. So if you can shuffle all your MTArchiveList-containing template code into a separate template that you include with SSI, and then use the rebuild type mod to tell MT to only build that template when you save an entry, chances are very good that all your comment and trackback troubles will go away.
I went eight months averaging around one failed comment save per day (gee, thanks DreamHost), but since I put in the rebuild type mod, I haven't had a single failure (knock on sysadmin heads).
→ Posted by: Phil Ringnalda at May 23, 2003 6:17 AM
(Content free comment, hoping to trigger a rebuild that will include my previous, 500-ed comment).
→ Posted by: Phil Ringnalda at May 23, 2003 6:19 AM
I was on pair with U2log.com and had to move because of the reaper thing. I moved to Dreamhost, who then tightened things up and gave me the same problems. Then pair changed their reaper policy specifically to accomodate MT users. So I moved the site back again.
U2log.com runs with around 10,000 comments as we speak. I've got them mostly switched off now for other reasons, but with the MySQL thing installed they were running pretty smoothly and error 500 probs were reduced to a minimum. And I'm not even using the cgi-wrap option. I'm on eite.pair.com - I think there are differences between servers too.
→ Posted by: Caroline at May 23, 2003 6:34 AM
I've got a similar problem at work since they upgraded the version of Apache on the web server. It turned out that my perl script was producing a warning message which was overrunning a buffer somewhere. Solution: remove the "-w" switch to turn of the warnings.
(I could have fixed the error message of course but that is a long story...)
Apparently the version of Apache they loaded either has tightened up it's error tolerance or has a bug...
→ Posted by: Steve at May 23, 2003 6:35 AM
I was on pair with U2log.com and had to move because of the reaper thing. I moved to Dreamhost, who then tightened things up and gave me the same problems. Then pair changed their reaper policy specifically to accomodate MT users. So I moved the site back again.
U2log.com runs with around 10,000 comments as we speak. I've got them mostly switched off now for other reasons, but with the MySQL thing installed they were running pretty smoothly and error 500 probs were reduced to a minimum. And I'm not even using the cgi-wrap option. I'm on eite.pair.com - I think there are differences between servers too.
→ Posted by: Caroline at May 23, 2003 6:35 AM
I think I am using the MySQL version of the site, actually. I don't have any trouble with rebuilding large blocks of the site - only with the comments facility - everything else now works perfectly...
→ Posted by: Tom Coates at May 23, 2003 9:18 AM
I'd just like to say thank you to everyone for being so helpful. I found Phil's post particularly illuminating, and tried turning off a few of the automatic index template rebuilds. I didn't think these would have any impact (I was under the impression that not all index templates were rebuilt anyway when you posted a comment), but turning off a couple of them appears to have had a tremendous effect. Most comments now seem to be going through without any trouble... I'll keep everyone informed if this continues to work...
→ Posted by: Tom Coates at May 23, 2003 9:33 AM