I have finally taken the plunge and upgraded from MT 3.36 to MT 4.36, but I am having significant performance issues with both the MovableType interface and with the publishing.
In the MT interface, everything takes twice as long as it used to on MT 3.36: logging in, loading an entry, loading a template, saving a template (without even rebuilding), loading the comments, deleting an unpublished comment, switching from one blog to another...
It is all very sluggish, and any given page takes 6-8 seconds to load (versus 3-4 seconds on my previous 3.36 installation).
When I try to publish a single entry on my main blog (950 entries / 22,000 comments / 400 tags), the publishing time is also double what it used to be, from 1 min 8 secs before the migration to 2 min 12 seconds after.
I have enabled cachemem, turned on caching on the relevant template modules, and set up Queue Publishing for the category and monthly archive pages, but this only lowered the publishing time to 1 min 54 secs, still very slow compared to 3.36.
I will note that this is a fresh installation of MT 4.36 (not installed over the old one) and that it is running on the same machine, in the same environment (i.e. with the same available disk space and CPU).
I haven't yet tweaked my 3.x templates to incorporate new 4.x template features, but I read so much about the efforts that were made to speed things up in 4.x* that I didn't expect such a performance loss out of the box.
Has anyone else encountered the same issues? Can you offer suggestions or pointers as to what I could do to improve the response time of both the MovableType interface and speed up the publishing?
Your help will be greatly appreciated -- thank you!
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* In the release notes I read, "In Movable Type 4.2 we did an extensive and thorough code audit looking for every way we could imagine to increase performance. These changes mean that simply by installing Movable Type 4.2 without making any other changes to your templates or configuration you will see significant improvements."
Reported on Movable Type 4.3
The 3.X templates were not designed to be particularly modular. The 4.X templates are better suited for taking advantage of the module caching in 4.X.
The CMS is indeed a bit slower in 4.X, but that is the price that one pays for the expanded functionality of 4.X over 3.X.
There is a fork of MT 4 called Melody which is working to slim down 4.X by making it a lot more modular. MT 5 is also intended to address more of that problem area.
Mike - Thanks a lot for your response.
As it happens, my 3.x templates were very modular as it was (I had tweaked the defaults beyond recognition), but I will study the 4.x default templates and see what I can incorporate to help with the publishing performance.
And I will very much look forward to that Melody version. I may even wait for it before I migrate my production environment -- do you know if there is a scheduled release date at this point?
Thanks again for your insights,
Clotilde.
Melody is still a work in development. Here is the roadmap. A 1.0 release is not **far** away, though.
Great info -- thanks a lot!