I"m trying to troubleshoot a MT site where the actions of just hitting save on an entry takes about 5 minutes. If you go into Manage Entries, and check one and then hit publish, that only takes a few seconds.
What is going on during the process of 'saving' that takes so long?
Reported on Movable Type 4.2
It could be that the templates are very complicated and the server is not powerful enough to handle them in a reasonable amount of time.
You will have to optimize it to work faster.
In my experience I've been able to optimize some projects up to 80 times. It's not a typing mistake. On an assignment for a large european publisher the best results for a project was 80 x, while the "lowest" result was 20 times faster.
Your newly published entries may be pinging Technorati, which stopped accepting pings in October. You could be hanging as MT still tries to connect there.
Go to Preferences --> Web Services and uncheck technorati.com, Save, then try a new entry, see if it's faster.
The customer went wild with custom fields...there are over 100. Unfortunately, because the MT code for custom fields is about as inefficient as possible, this results in some really slow saving. in 1 save, there are ~4000 deletes, ~2000 updates, and ~2000 selects!
Deleting the custom fields from MT makes everything faster...of course. any ideas?
Can I assume that you've run some sort of database logging or profiling if you're citing those numbers?
sort of rudimentary...turned on the query logging in mysql.
i'm not able to get a good picture of performance of these transactions however...i'm more used to the query tracing features of sqlserver.
8,000 queries sounds like something else may be a factor if that is happening only on publishing a single entry. It wouldn't be if it were republishing a site, but if that really is just a single entry you should contact the MTOS developer mailing list and see if you can talk to some of 6A's developers directly as well as filing a bug report @ movabletype.org/feedback.html because if that is a problem with Custom Fields, that would be something of serious interest to them.
Have you tried using memcached on the server and adding it to mt-config.cgi? It might help in cutting down on all those queries going on.
i found that newer versions of MT 4 have this saving bug removed...if you have LOTS of custom fields and saving an entry is REALLY slow, upgrade!!!