We have been running a single install of MovableType 3.21 to run approximately 33 different blogs. This setup has been running for a few years now, and though it has not been without it's difficulties, overall the system was stable. However, for the past few months, some of the blogs have been experiencing increasingly horrendous rebuild times. Additionally, since comment posting triggers a rebuild, the system times-out before the commenter sees any response to their browser resulting in a user experience similar to sticking one's hand in a meat grinder.
I'm sure this is merely a result of numerous factors compounding one another:
- Old version of MT
- Very large number of posts (?)
- Inefficiently built templates
- Too many (and poorly written) plugins installed
- Underpowered server
However, it seems to me that the MT's architecture also deserves its share of the blame. Many of the installed plugins are only used by one (or few) blog, yet the 32 other blogs suffer as a result since they all must process the plugin, even if there is nothing to do. I don't think this is any different in MT 4.1 (or 4.2). Anyone?
In the end, we decided to split the blogs off onto their own MT installs and reinstall only the plugins required for each blog (no simple task I must say). So now we've created for ourselves a maintenance nightmare, but hey, at least MT-CustomFields won't break some of my blogs anymore.
