Taking Six Apart to task
Having had a number of problems with Movable Type over the years, and knowing countless people who have thrown up their hands and ditched Six Apart products completely - to the point where I no longer recommend MT to clients, and actively discourage others from building their online presence with it - I was very interested in Suw Charman’s criticisms of MT reliability. Six Apart’s Anil Dash shows up in the comments with a defensive, snarky response which doesn’t quite match up with the affable Anil I’ve met.
As for the US and UK ‘household names’ Suw mentions that are having major problems with MT, I have to wonder if the Guardian is one of them. When I heard, a few years ago, that they were paying Ben Hammersley to build their blogging arenas in Movable Type, I had a feeling it would all end in tears. Ben may be a code wrangler par excellence, but I just cannot imagine that MT copes very well with the comment load - and inevitable spam load - that the Guardian must attract. (Anyone in the know who cares to contradict and correct me is more than welcome to do so. I’m just sayin’, I have a hunch on this one.)
Filed under: Life
Jackie, you’re right — as with a lot of the things I wrote on Friday, i was uncharacteristically strident and humorless. But the factual basis of the points I’ve raised is true: MT scales to enormous load, easily meeting and exceeding the scalability of any other blogging tool out there.
Where we have let the community down is on documenting best practices on how to set up a system for that kind of scalability, and how to appropriately manage comments in a way that scales, especially when under spam attack. But there is a difference between “my setup isn’t working for me” and “this tool can’t possibly do this job”. We’re happy to help in the former, but I do get frustrated by the latter because I know it’s simply not true, especially when compared to the alternatives.
Hope that helps answer your question. As a specific example, both the Huffington Post and the Washington Post, which I mentioned in Suw’s comments, are handling many more readers and many more commenters than the Guardian, though we are of course quite pleased to see how successful the Guardian’s blogs have been, too.
If MT doesn’t cope well with comments spam (or just ordinary comments for that matter) what does?
I’m not running the blogging systems at the Guardian anymore, so I can’t comment on any current issues. But I can say what I know about MT load issues from my experiences there and elsewhere.
The main issue is when you have a comment posted to a thread that already has a lot of comments on it. On Comment is Free, for example, there are regularly three or four live threads with more than 500 comments. Everytime a new comment is posted, the database is queried hundreds of times and because of this, and because MT’s internal code is quite inefficient at rebuilding pages, server loads can get very high. *Especially* when you are running three or four blogs on the size and comment-traffic of Comment is Free on just the one box.
This is a bit unfair on 6A, in that MT wasn’t really designed (quite obviously not, in fact) to scale to such interactive traffic. The static traffic, of course, is nothing to do with MT, but relies on Apache. They don’t get any credit for that.
As for spam, there’s no load at all. Once we’d turned off trackbacks (which are horrendous spambait) and made commentors go through our Guardian ID sign on procedure, the spammers dropped off to almost-zero. Anything that does get through is done manually by a soon-to-be-banned user id.
It’s been very interesting reading Suw’s post and the responses to it, because they run at variance with my experiences as a Movable Type Enterprise customer for the last six months. We’ve had tech support from their Paris office in our building helping us optimise our configurations, and giving us scaling options as our blogs grow. I’ve had meetings with senior 6A management to make sure that their roadmap for the next few versions matches our needs.
One could make some educated guesses from this as to the direction of MT.
I really must post about this…
Thanks for the comments, guys! Much appreciated.
I should also point out that when one client of mine (a small business, not a huge media player) had a problem with MT, he got a lot of handholding from Jay Allen until it was resolved.
I’m the blogs editor at the Guardian so can comment about the current issues. We did have some problems in Janaury handling the comment load. However, it was also a record month for us so we were victims of our own success in some ways. As Ben points out, Comment is Free and our Sport blog routinely have several posts going at once with 100s of comments each, and up until recently, MT made the database work really hard.
We never had problems serving pages, apart from a couple of hours of downtime when we had some emergency server work due to the loss of a link on our WAN due to some bad weather and a godawful amount of traffic that MT was generating between two colos. The issue was the comment volume, and as Ben says, for us spam wasn’t an issue, unlike a major UK broadcaster that got hammered by the spambots. With the new version of Movable Type, we don’t have performance problems. It was a dramatic improvement and a welcome change.
Adam, your experience with Six Apart is contrary to ours until recently. They are being very helpful now so I don’t wish to make much of that, but they know they have some work to do with their ticketing support system.