Movable Type in the fast lane

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).
Ø permalink: https://davidroessli.com/logs/2007/02/movable_type_in_the_fast_lane/
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Reponses to “Movable Type in the fast lane”
#1 by De Soto
02:27 on 19 July 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.