Captcha images rendering slowly

By ScottM on Feb 12, 2012 at 2:04 PM 4 Vote 0 Votes

I'm having a problem with the captcha images for mt-comments.cgi rendering. They are rendering very, very slowly.

For example, visiting the URL:

http://www.mydomain.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-comments.cgi/captcha/214/BARMhWgYCoRUenR3xtwu3m9pMpS4r40u0FHmwW3b

results in the captcha image taking about 30 seconds to render.

Why is this taking so long? How can I resolve this?

Thanks

Reported on Movable Type 5

4 Replies

| Add a Reply

Mihai Bocsaru | February 12, 2012 2:38 PM | Reply

Hi Scott,

Maybe your commenting script is flooded.

You may like to change its file name and call the new commenting script file name using this configuration directive inside your mt-config.cgi file:

CommentScript newFileName.cgi

Then you would have to rebuild your entry archives so that the form would point to this new script name.

Ideally you would stop providing the path to the script from inside the form coding that is inside your entry archives and pass that from the javascript index template, in pieces, not the full URL to the comment script.

That way you would make sure that your new script file name won't be discovered by spam bots.

Kind Regards,
Mihai Bocsaru

----------------------------------
Daily Movable Type Consultant

Web Development
Movable Type Consulting
Six Apart Partner

http://www.pro-it-service.com/
----------------------------------

Movable Type Demo
http://www.movabletypedemo.org/
ScottM | February 12, 2012 2:43 PM | Reply

I initially thought it might be flooding, but I don't think that's the case.

I actually started blocking all connections to the server (using iptables on the server, I have root access). And only allowing my IP address to access the server.

So, nobody else is running anything else on the server. Server load is essentially 0. There are no other connections to the server.

Yet, when I visit:

http://www.mydomain.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-comments.cgi/captcha/214/BARMhWgYCoRUenR3xtwu3m9pMpS4r40u0FHmwW3b

It takes about 30 seconds for the image to load.

I don't know where the hold up is.

The image renders, so ImageMagick is working. I'm just at a complete loss as to what is taking it so long to render.

I don't think it is a performance issue with the server (although technically I can't rule that out) because everything else works fine. Other images render fine, webpages load fine, everything runs fine. Except for the 30 seconds it takes to render these captcha images.
Mihai Bocsaru | February 13, 2012 5:02 AM | Reply

What about the time it takes to post a comment?

It might be something wrong with the server load, which might have very little resources for the mt-comments.cgi script.
Sebastian Boethin | April 20, 2013 2:50 PM | Reply

Hi,
I have the same problem with a quite fresh installation of MTOS-5.2.3 on a Debian Squeezy VE with Perl 5.10.1, everything up-to-date and definitely without any large traffic.

The loading of the captcha image takes up to 1 minute. During the loading process, 'mt-comments.cgi' takes 75% CPU.

regards
Sebastian