Hang on, I’m not done waiting yet

The server that hosts radinfo.musc.edu is hardly a speed demon (it’s a dual 450 MHz Pentium II), so for most things I’ve got running on this server, I’m used to waiting a little bit for things to get processed.

Lately I’ve been running the wheeljack dev build of Movable Type (I like to be on the bleeding edge of software) which has incorporated support for FastCGI (recently rolled out with MT 3.34). I finally got around to building FastCGI and incorporating it into the Apache config to see how it would help with the back end of MT. While it’s not much of an improvement on this pokey slow machine, it’s definitely faster than pre-FastCGI. MT’s user interface has become noticeably faster although I’ve had to give up an old hit counter CGI program that just didn’t want to run under FastCGI. It’s definitely enough of a speed improvement to make me happy.

Still need to test things to make sure everything works. If anybody happens to notice something got busted, let me know.

Update 1: Well, publishing an entry took a curiously long time. Normally once I hit the publish button I usually see the next screen that say things are getting published and sites are getting pinged. This time it stayed on the entry screen for several minutes before switching. I wonder if this is normal…

Update 2: Looks like commenting is really slow too. Seeing a lot of error messages in the Apache error log about the mt-comment.cgi and mt.cgi processes getting killed and restarted during comment processing. Seems like anything involving rebuilding takes a long long time. Might have to back out the FastCGI stuff.

Update 3: There were too many unexplained errors showing up in the Apache error log so I decided to back out the FastCGI stuff for now, at least until after the weekend when I might have some more time to investigate.