{"id":10398,"date":"2007-01-29T07:13:31","date_gmt":"2007-01-29T14:13:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp\/2007\/01\/29\/the-future-is-murky.html"},"modified":"2007-01-29T07:13:31","modified_gmt":"2007-01-29T14:13:31","slug":"the_future_is_murky","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2007\/01\/29\/the_future_is_murky.html","title":{"rendered":"The Future is … Murky!<\/i>"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of the biggies about the Movable Type 3.34 upgrade<\/a> was its built-in, out-of-the-box support for FastCGI, a remain-memory-resident implementation of the CGI used to run the MT scripts. Since loading up MT modules into memory takes time (esp. during spam attacks), this was intended to speed things up mightily.<\/p>\n

\n

We have been educating users for some time about the benefits of hosting Movable Type under FastCGI<\/a>, a free and light weight persistent hosting environment for web applications. However, prior to Movable Type 3.34, FastCGI support could only be achieved by applying a number of patches to the MT source code. In 3.34, however, those patches are no longer necessary; FastCGI support has been fully integrated into the core application. Now Movable Type is capable of detecting
\nwhen it is running under FastCGI automatically and take advantage of its unique performance benefits without the user or the system administrator needing to do a thing. <\/p>\n

Because of the profound performance benefits of FastCGI and the security fixes made in Movable Type 3.34 we encourage all users to upgrade to the latest version of Movable Type as soon as possible.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Thence follows in the announcement many bullets about how spiffy FastCGI is — increased app performance, increased commenting performance, increased reliability, increased resiliency during spam attacks. Yay!<\/p>\n

Except …<\/p>\n

Well, MT’s documentation for how to actually get MT 3.34 to work under FastCGI is … well, frankly, pretty crappy. I am not, myself, a complete tyro at these things. I’m no UNIX or Perl expert, but I can make my way around FTP and the Control Panel and the like, and have supported by MT and other hosted applications in a relatively decent fashion.<\/p>\n

That said … the docs are pretty crappy. The announcement above? It points to the following:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. \nA Flash presentation on how to upgrade to 3.34<\/a> — which doesn’t mention FastCGI, and is, in fact, the Flash presentation made for the upgrade from 3.1 to 3.2 (and the 3.34 upgrade, if from 3.33, doesn’t actually do most of what the Flash shows).<\/li>\n
  2. \nThe Movable Type\/FastCGI Installation Instructions<\/a> — which, really, aren’t. Instead, it’s the 6A Development Wiki page on FastCGI. Far from a step-by-step, it’s a scattergun of various dev notes and suggestions, some of which repeat each other, some of which seem to contradict each other. The page has in turn a series of links to various articles on making MT 3.33<\/u> run with FastCGI, all of which are heavy-duty
    \nunder-the-hood style system tweaks (some of which have an update that says, “this is much simpler under 3.34 without specifics”).<\/li>\n
  3. \nMT and FastCGI benchmarks<\/a>. Woo-hoo! It runs faster! That’s a help in installing thigns … not.<\/li>\n
  4. \nThe FastCGI home page<\/a> — which doesn’t mention MT.<\/li>\n
  5. \nInfo (from the above) on implementing FastCGI on your web server — which, again, doesn’t mention MT.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    I.e., if you were expecting something simple and straightforward on how to turn on FastCGI and then turn MT on to using it — so sorry. Despite it being<\/a> the “highest recommendation” of 6A and “the future of MT,”<\/em> it is clearly not<\/em> just a matter of running an install script or copying over or renaming some files. Granted, the UNIX world (and FastCGI implementations) are a
    \nlegion of slightly incompatible “I did this over here and it fixed the error in those instructions over there,” but 6A is going to have to make this implementation a lot more bullet-proof and straightforward to get folks to use it (like I would still<\/em> like to).<\/p>\n

    Because despite the claim “Now Movable Type is capable of detecting when it is running under FastCGI automatically and take advantage of its unique performance benefits without the user or the system administrator needing to do a thing” (even the dev wiki doesn’t claim that), I just can’t get it to work. I can’t get the “hello world” test to work. I get some cryptic errors in the server error log (some of which I’ve been able to interpret), and 500 errors from the revised scripts. I could
    \npoke at it a lot harder, and maybe after putting in another ten or twenty hours of work I could figure out what was going on. Or maybe not. In either case, I don’t have that amount of time to invest. At least not this week.<\/p>\n

    Disappointing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    One of the biggies about the Movable Type 3.34 upgrade was its built-in, out-of-the-box support for FastCGI, a remain-memory-resident implementation of the CGI used to run the MT scripts. Since…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10398","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogging"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":11939,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2007\/12\/27\/back_on_the_spam_front.html","url_meta":{"origin":10398,"position":0},"title":"Back on the Spam front …","author":"***Dave","date":"Thu 27-Dec-07 10:57am","format":false,"excerpt":"I've been working with the Hosting Matters folks to get FastCGI up and running on the server I'm on.\u00a0 The biggest problem (from a spam perspective) that Movable Type...","rel":"","context":"In "Blogging & Internet"","block_context":{"text":"Blogging & Internet","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/blogging"},"img":{"alt_text":"spam","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/images\/spam.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":10407,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2007\/01\/25\/still_being_carborunded_b.html","url_meta":{"origin":10398,"position":1},"title":"Still being carborunded by the illegitami","author":"***Dave","date":"Thu 25-Jan-07 7:30pm","format":false,"excerpt":"And feeling ground down. Now that I'm on my own server (Brizi) ... I'm still getting swacked with various spammy attacks. Bleah. None of the spam is getting through --...","rel":"","context":"In "Blogging & Internet"","block_context":{"text":"Blogging & Internet","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/blogging"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":11942,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2007\/12\/27\/back_on_the_spam_front_2.html","url_meta":{"origin":10398,"position":2},"title":"Back on the Spam front …","author":"***Dave","date":"Thu 27-Dec-07 8:07am","format":false,"excerpt":"I've been working with the Hosting Matters folks to get FastCGI up and running on the server I'm on.\u00a0 The biggest problem (from a spam perspective) that Movable Type...","rel":"","context":"In "Blogging & Internet"","block_context":{"text":"Blogging & Internet","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/blogging"},"img":{"alt_text":"spam","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/images\/spam.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":10375,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2007\/02\/01\/lack_of_commentary.html","url_meta":{"origin":10398,"position":3},"title":"Lack of Commentary","author":"***Dave","date":"Thu 1-Feb-07 11:12am","format":false,"excerpt":"Yes, the comment script was not working this morning. No, it was not due to spammers (directly) or FastCGI or MT or even a grue. I noticed a number of...","rel":"","context":"In "Blogging & Internet"","block_context":{"text":"Blogging & Internet","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/blogging"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":8996,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2006\/03\/08\/shifting_a_blog.html","url_meta":{"origin":10398,"position":4},"title":"Shifting a blog category to another blog in Movable Type","author":"***Dave","date":"Wed 8-Mar-06 1:32pm","format":false,"excerpt":"Notes to self, after checking out the MT import\/export support forum: Learning Movable Type: Moving an Entry from One Blog to Another WizbangTech: Cloning Movable Type Categories (someone else's take...","rel":"","context":"In "Blogging & Internet"","block_context":{"text":"Blogging & Internet","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/blogging"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":12011,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2007\/12\/13\/open_source_movable_type.html","url_meta":{"origin":10398,"position":5},"title":"Open Source Movable Type","author":"***Dave","date":"Thu 13-Dec-07 1:44pm","format":false,"excerpt":"Quoth Anil Dash: As of today, and forever forward, Movable Type is open source. This means you can freely modify, redistribute, and use Movable Type for any purpose you choose....","rel":"","context":"In "Blogging & Internet"","block_context":{"text":"Blogging & Internet","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/blogging"},"img":{"alt_text":"mt4-bug-mt-white.png","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.movabletype.org\/mt4-bug-mt-white.png?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10398","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10398"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10398\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10398"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10398"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10398"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}