Movable Type in the fast lane
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One of Pronet's latest weblog posts entitled "Make Movable Type 15 times faster!" attracted my attention a few days ago, and I decided to give it a try over the weekend. It turns out that the latest version of Movable Type is really faster when run under FastCGI. A Developer wiki's post explains how to run Movable Type under FastCGI.
Unfortunately, my main hosting provider pair Networks doesn't provide FastCGI support in my hosting plan, so I decided to try it out on my brand new (mt) MediaTemple (gs) Grid-Server account. The first thing was to find out if FastCGI was installed. I didn't find the list of installed Apache modules in the KnowledgeBase, so I ran the test documented in the developer's wiki article:
Add the following code to an .htaccess file in your MT directory:
<IfModule mod_fastcgi.c>
FastCgiIpcDir /tmp/fcgi_ipc/
AddHandler fastcgi-script .fcgi
FastCGIConfig -autoUpdate -idle-timeout 120 -killInterval 3600 -maxClassProcesses 6 -maxProcesses 15
</IfModule>Then create a [HelloWorld.fcgi] file and see if it loads properly. If it does, FastCGI is installed. Any other error and it probably isn't.
I ran the script, and guess what, "Hello World!" popped up in my browser!
I don't know if the increase in performance is 15 fold, but it feels significantly faster, which is exciting. This adds to my favourable first impressions of (mt) Media Temple's (gs) Grid-Server plan. I've been playing with it since the beginning of the year, and I am very impressed by it (but more on that in a later post).
Comments and responses
19 Jul 2007
MT’s grid doesn’t use FastCGI. The script you ran may have output the expected results, but support confirms they have no plans to install FastCGI.