While upgrading to MT 4.1, I discovered that the "Archives" sidebar widget seems to significantly add to rebuild times.
On my site (which has about 500 entries), I found that including the Archives widget made my rebuild time about 5 times slower overall: http://www.cantoni.org/2008/03/04/mt-archive-widget
Has anyone else seen similar results?
I have not yet run this test with the logging-enabled build of MTOS, but will try that next.
This is great analysis! Thank you so much. This is exactly the type of research and data collection we are looking for!
There are some exciting new features coming in MT 4.2 which I hope will alleviate some of the slowness issues with the archive widget.
1) Module Caching - you will be able to cache widgets and modules for a period of time (or until a certain event occurs) - this should have a huge impact for example on the problem you describe.
2) Server Side Includes - don't know the best name of this yet, but it works by turning your template modules into an SSI like <php include('foo') ?> or an SHTML include, etc. This means that a widget or module will get built once and be instantly updated across your site.
MT 4.2 is looking to make the static publishing model much more flexible and I hope move MT closer to becoming the most scalable dynamic publishing system on the planet. But let's not get ahead of ourselves yet! :)
I set up 3 widgets as php includes to be cached until I make changes. Recent comments to update after new comment, category archives, and monthly archives after entry or category. I can't find them on the source as php includes, but because they're included in other templates before they make it to the web that might be why.
I noticed a 4 minute improvement in rebuild times. A significant improvement. My site has over 1000 entries and was taking 9 + minutes for a rebuild, it's now down to 5.