I’ve been working with the Hosting Matters folks to get FastCGI up and running on the server I’m on.
The biggest problem (from a spam perspective) that Movable Type has is that it’s all script based, and everyone who hits a script spawns a new instance of it (as I vaguely understand), which, during heavy attacks, means a lot of serious overhead on the server. Since 99% of the anti-spam measures in MT are script-based (fired off after someone invokes the comment or trackback script), that’s a real problem.
MT supposedly works now with FastCGI. Under that setup, a script, once fired off, stays in memory, and is reusable from there. That would seriously reduce the impact of spam attacks. Problem is, I haven’t been able to get even a simple “Hello World” FCGI script to run.
I tried working this back last January and had no luck. Hopefully I can get it running now.
I’m also seriously pondering making the move over to MT4 while I’m off here in Faerie (but not these couple of days I’m in the office). It won’t specifically address the spam issue, but I’d like to be on something approaching the latest-greatest. My biggest question mark at this point is the fork between MT Open Source and MT4 proper.