Today we launch the new(ish) Signal vs. Noise. Well, it’s not all that new on your end, but it’s all new on our end.
We’ve been using Movable Type since the early days. But thousands of posts and tens of thousands of comments later, it’s just gotten a little too slow for us. If you’ve tried to post a comment anytime in the past year you’ve noticed it may take up to a minute or more for that comment to be saved. That really took the fun out of commenting.
So we went off and built our own little blog engine that could. It’s not a product we’re going to sell or share, it’s just something we put together for our own use. Now SvN is blazing fast again. Eventually it will allow us to do a few more things around here we’ve been thinking about doing but didn’t have the software to do it. And in the spirit of our camping product names, internally we call this software Blog Cabin.
We decided not to copy over all the old posts to the new system. It was messy and there were weird formatting issues that just weren’t worth dealing with. You can still get to the old posts, and you can of course search for them in the sidebar as well. They’re all still there in static HTML.
So here we go. We hope you enjoy the speed of the new system. And as time goes on we hope you like some of the new things you’ll see around here.
tim jolly
on 12 Oct 06I had to see how fast the comment got saved, hope the engine works well for you.
michael
on 12 Oct 06i too had to check the speed. i was so confused by how short svn’s page was until i actually read the article. you guys never stop developing, do ya?
Jeremiah
on 12 Oct 06congrats
Dave Rau
on 12 Oct 06Sweet. Comments were starting to be lame; I was getting network timeouts all the time posting.
Mike
on 12 Oct 06Did the RSS feed change? The last post My Yahoo page is picking up is the Sixteen Straight post.
JF
on 12 Oct 06The feed is still powered by Feedburner at the same Feedburner address: http://feeds.feedburner.com/37signals/beMH
You may want to subscribe to this one if you are subscribed to an older one.
Scott Meade
on 12 Oct 06Sorry – couldn’t help it. I too had to post to see how fast this comment got saved (and I’m sure we’ll all be watching to see that Blog Cabin maintains performance even as the number of records grow :) )
sammy
on 12 Oct 06Just out of curiosity, can you tell us if there’s anything fancy-shmancy going on behind the scenes with Blog Cabin? Integration with other 37signals sites, perhaps?
I’m just curious because you say you’re not sharing the source code. I’m wondering if that’s because something interesting is in store, or because it’s just not worth cleaning up to the point where you’d release it into the wild.
Jeff Croft
on 12 Oct 06Awesome. Definitely feels fast again. keep up the good work!
Randy Peterman
on 12 Oct 06So… can you please share some of the design choices you made for your blogging software? Things like dynamic vs. static, Ruby on Rails [just kidding], and whether or not it has a WYSIWYG typing interface?
JF
on 12 Oct 06I’m just curious because you say you’re not sharing the source code. I’m wondering if that’s because something interesting is in store, or because it’s just not worth cleaning up to the point where you’d release it into the wild.
Because there’s nothing much to it, it’s set up for our own needs, and releasing it wouldn’t add any value to the world.
There are plenty of solid blogging packages out there. Blog Cabin does exactly what we need, has some special logic baked into it, and it would be a waste of everyone’s time to put it out there.
Mike Swimm
on 12 Oct 06Blog Cabin is truly a brilliant name. I would be very proud of myself if I had thought of it.
brian warren
on 12 Oct 06Congrats guys! I was wondering when you’d roll your own.
Robby Russell
on 12 Oct 06“Now SvN is blazing fast again. “
It’s still loading for me… ;-)
Kent Crutchfield
on 12 Oct 06It seems slower to me. I use Safari on a pretty fast connection. Maybe it’s being hammered by Digg or something.
Also, the sidebar on the right has the last line of each product (except RoR) lined up too far to the left. (Picky, I know, but I thought you would like to know…)
Nick MCcNeill
on 12 Oct 06Good job, except that for me SVN is far from blazing fast. I’ve never seen it so slow. Just a heads up, I’m sure you still have things to tweak.
Jesper
on 12 Oct 06I realize that that’s temporary, but I was getting around one minute page loads a few minutes back (and it’s still slow), and if you don’t get the irony in that I don’t know what to tell you.
Congratulations on taking another step towards full dogfooding.
Dirk
on 12 Oct 06Blog Cabin, good name. And JF you are right not to sell it, there are a lot of blog tools out there…
Eric
on 12 Oct 06the first three times I loaded the blog, I got unformatted pages. and the 37s site in general seems to be running slowly this morning…probably just a coincidence?
mz
on 12 Oct 06Hi. Excellent work on the engine, however it seems your comments function has a bug. The email address parsing doesn’t add a mailto: to the address.
best mz
Glenn Davies
on 12 Oct 06Yeah – I am getting a page that has no border on the right side in Safari and the page took a very long time to load. Some updates going on?
Daniel
on 12 Oct 06Either there’s a bug that’s duplicating certain comments, or people are still experiencing slow comment posting, and in their impatience jamming the “Post this Comment” button a million times…
JF
on 12 Oct 06Yeah, we ran into some issues but I think we have it under control. Note to self: Never promise blazing fast ;)
Kyle
on 12 Oct 06Wow..that’s blazing fast. I nearly burned myself. :-)
Dan Boland
on 12 Oct 06Man, bloggers are leaving 6A behind in droves. Good riddance.
Bas
on 12 Oct 06Everything loads instantly for me, like any other site. I just noticed though, that when you start your URL with ‘www.’, it won’t add ‘http://’ in front of it. Like with Eric’s comment up there ^^.
Jesper
on 12 Oct 06That’s more like it.
A “remember details” checkbox wouldn’t hurt.
JF
on 12 Oct 06Bas (and others), we have some autolinking to fix. This isn’t perfect yet, but it going to get close soon.
Dan Boland
on 12 Oct 06Wow, this is really impressive, guys. You’ve gone from one extreme to the other. How long until you start licensing this? =)
forrestRain
on 12 Oct 06Blog Cabin is such a nice name.
Jökull
on 12 Oct 06Any news on Sunrise? I need it!
Dan Boland
on 12 Oct 06Question: does this degrade gracefully for older browsers? I’m using Safari, so it doesn’t affect me personally, just curious because it’s clear this is AJAX-driven.
Brandon Eley
on 12 Oct 06Good to hear… I know you don’t think the world needs another blogging engine but it sure could use a lightweight Rails-based blog. If you get bored in the coming months you could always release it just to see.
Anyway, just wanted to post to see how quick it was – posting on the old site was getting on my nerves too. :)
Sam
on 12 Oct 06ForrestRain is right, brilliant name as usual from you guys.
Chris
on 12 Oct 06I too love Blog Cabin. I immediately got this image of a drafty cabin halfway up a mountain with a laptop and a satellite on its roof.
Great to see the speed. It’s minor, but I do miss the SVN-commenter highlighting … will that be coming back at some point or was it specifically done away with?
Rob
on 12 Oct 06Shoulda went wit Mephisto.
Des Traynor
on 12 Oct 06Nice one.
Could one of you guys please add some CSS so that posts made by the SvN employees have a white background again, it was useful for skimming through the comments.
Thanks
Des
Tim
on 12 Oct 06I was hoping for a little refresh to the blog interface :(
Of course, this comment is more about testing the speed of posintg comments.
Start the timer…
Jason Liebe
on 12 Oct 06Just had to test it out to see.
Where can I (and others) stay up to date on RoR classes and conferences? I’m in Wisconsin for a bit while my girlfriend finishes college and noticed I just missed a Chicago event October 9th that I would have certainly attended had I known about it.
I had the luck of seeing Dave Thomas at Austinonrails when I lived there. I’d be happy to pay to hear him speak again as the experience was invaluable.
Matt
on 12 Oct 06Hope people don’t mind, just taking the speed though. Blog Cabin is an awesome name.
-Matt
Matt
on 12 Oct 06...I meant testing the speed. It’s definitely fast!
Tracy
on 12 Oct 06I’m not a MovableType fanboy or anything, but I find it unfair to say:
— MT with tens of thousands of comments is slow. Our new system, however, with 3 posts and a few dozen comments is blazing fast. Give it a try and see how much better 37signals is!Get real! It’s only fair to brag when this new system also holds tens of thousands of posts…
Phil Freo
on 12 Oct 06Speed test…
Christopher Hawkins
on 12 Oct 06I have nothing to say, I’m just posting to see if it really is faster… ;)
Christopher Hawkins
on 12 Oct 06...and it is! Good work.
Ian Pitts
on 12 Oct 06Man, the “Blog Cabin” name is just great!
We couldn’t find anything suitable for our corporate blog either, and ended up writing our own from scratch, just like you.
Adam
on 12 Oct 06JF – How long would you say it took to create Blog Cabin – from start to finish? Was this a ‘work on it in your spare time’ type of project?
I really respect how quickly and efficiently you guys get things done.
eboss
on 12 Oct 06Hi,
I understand why, from you siide you consider that it won’t be valuable for the world to see the code. It’s true that it may not be better than any other blog tool available, but from a new-to-rails perspective it would be very interesting to see how you are building your apps, how you make the stuff together, how you use some stuff that I don’t imagine it exists, …
It could some quite simple but very valuable case-study from the develeper side.
However, Thanks again for your brilliant work. I’m a basecamp user, many hours by day, with 20+ projects , … IT’S GREAT
Jesper
on 12 Oct 06Not to be a nag, but… Result: Failed validation, 19 errors. link tags in the body tag. Oy.
Additionally, posting a comment doesn’t work in OmniWeb 5.5. It’s a noop.
bjhess
on 12 Oct 06...just testing your speed…
pedro
on 12 Oct 06I would assume that Blog Cabin is strictly RoR. Seems that RoR blogging options aren’t all that super though… or at least they’ve been underwhelming to me.
Wog
on 12 Oct 06So, is it built on RoR?
JF
on 12 Oct 06JF – How long would you say it took to create Blog Cabin – from start to finish? Was this a ‘work on it in your spare time’ type of project?
Oh probably about 10 days off and on I’d say. There’s nothing much to it. Nothing fancy. Just post, edit, delete, multiple authors hardcoded in, RSS, and a couple of other things.
As far as code goes, there’s barely anything more to Blog Cabin than the original Build a blog with Rails screencast: http://media.rubyonrails.org/video/rails_take2_with_sound.mov
And you can also check out Typo, which is a lean blog tool built with Rails: http://scottstuff.net/blog/articles/2006/07/22/typo-4-0-0
it works
on 12 Oct 06Nice.
Marie
on 12 Oct 06Just to clarify, you’re attributing the previous slowness to Movable Type? Doesn’t it have more to do with the size of the database? And, when the database for this system becomes just as bloated, it too will become just as slow?
Rick
on 12 Oct 06Thank you.
Does this mean all my comments will make it to the site? (my submission on Tuesday never got posted)
Bill Litfin
on 12 Oct 06Good on ya.
One comment though—not that it has anything to do with anything, but I enjoyed seeing the author of the post in the RSS feed (which seems to have evaporated with the new engine).
e
on 12 Oct 06i want blog cabin i want blog cabin i want blog cabin i want blog cabin i want blog cabin i want blog cabin i want blog cabin i want blog cabin
David Kemp
on 12 Oct 06“They’re all still there in static HTML.”
Yeah, with the comments forms in place (which, of course, don’t work).
Tomas
on 12 Oct 06Great job. Testing Comment Speed.
Shaun Gummere
on 12 Oct 06Sorry, need to satisfy my curiosity on the speed on comment posting …
Aaron B.
on 12 Oct 06Any chance you’ll throw up some screenshots of the administrative section?
Caleb Buxton
on 12 Oct 06And yet still no comment preview… oh well, no big deal… lets see if the posting uses ajax.
Ben Darlow
on 12 Oct 06Hmm. Autocomplete no longer works. I’m wondering; are Rails conventions for form element name attributes a hindrance to usability? An input called ‘email’ will reliably offer previous selections in Firefox. An input called ‘comment[email]’ will not. I’ve never given this serious thought before, but I’m kind of thinking it’s A Bad Thing.
Ben Darlow
on 12 Oct 06In fact, it won’t remember it even after I’ve posted! Still, the speed of posting is appreciated, as is the comment appearing in-situ without a refresh. Very nice.
Dhruml
on 12 Oct 06nice, very fast. i like.
in my country it is like a man who went from riding a goat with 3 legs to a man riding a horse.
borat.
JF
on 12 Oct 06Any chance you’ll throw up some screenshots of the administrative section?
There is no administration section. If we’re logged in we see edit/delete links next to everything. We can edit/delete everything in place without having to go somewhere else to do that.
Mark Gukov
on 12 Oct 06Just another curious one posting here.
But, yeah, personally I can’t see how database size can affect the speed of inserting new rows.
mattl
on 12 Oct 06I like the punnage of ‘Blog Cabin’ – Jason: would be curious to know if this generates ‘static’ pages on disk like MT did/does or if it’s all on the fly from your MySQL databases?
Bob
on 12 Oct 06Hmm. great.
CM Harrington
on 12 Oct 06It seems your CSS is a bit muxed. After the 5th comment, if I roll over the comments, they all go white. Same thing with the sidebar.
Also, it seems your URLs aren’t showing up at all (in comments)
Eoghan
on 12 Oct 06There is no administration section. If we’re logged in we see edit/delete links next to everything. We can edit/delete everything in place without having to go somewhere else to do that.
Edit in place is all well and good for editing/deleting but how about a screenshot of your “add new entry” page or whatever ye call it.
MM
on 12 Oct 06One of the reasons that MT gets slower as it gets more data is that it automatically generates static files for all of its data. That regeneration step gets slow as there is more data to regenerate to static files on the disk.
With Blog Cabin we cache pages, but not as vigorously as MT does. That’s the bulk of the slow down with MT.
JF
on 12 Oct 06Edit in place is all well and good for editing/deleting but how about a screenshot of your “add new entry” page or whatever ye call it.
There’s nothing to see here… Please disburse… There’s nothing to see here.
The add an entry page has a title field, a body field, and a save button.
Will
on 12 Oct 06Congrats on the new system.
Creating your own is almost always more interesting and more fun than just using an off-the-shelf solution :)
Plus then it does exactly what you want it to do: nothing more and nothing less.
Su
on 12 Oct 06Of greater importance to the MT question is what, if anything, was actually done to fix the problem. Several suggestions were made, and possible oversights pointed out at the original post and externally, all of which apparently went unacknowledged.
The same rudimentary investigation I used in July reveals the same three(and possibly more) syndication feeds despite use of Feedburner, and unused category and monthly archives having been built up until yesterday. Yes, MT produces static files by default(defaults can be changed), but you’re also able to turn bits of that off, which was clearly never done, if necessary(no response on whether those archives were used internally). From what I can see on this side, there is very little if anything to have prevented SvN using MT’s dynamic publishing options, though having worked on significantly larger systems I’m still convinced the slowdown was self-inflicted.
As far as the Blog Cabin admin screen(s): If it’s not obvious yet, there’s clearly an aesthetic at play in anything 37S build. Go into Basecamp, Backpack, etc. Blog Cabin probably looks a lot like that, except wrapped around the form – little box for title, big box for content, and one or two other things – that you see in every single other blogging app. What are you digging for here?
nx
on 12 Oct 06Nice and fast!
rs
on 12 Oct 06fast ?? hmmm
Greg
on 12 Oct 06Minor gripe, but when you click on the jump links (“read more” or “Continued”), it takes you to the top of the comments section, not the part immediately after the jump, like it used to. My explanation sucks, but try it – it makes a lot more sense to see it.
That aside, pretty neat. I love that you’ve cut out the crap you don’t need, including apparently an admin interface. Very lightweight.
NP
on 12 Oct 06Great!
Anonymous
on 12 Oct 06Great job, hope it’s working smoothly as silk!
testing comments
on 12 Oct 06because they’re fast
Ben
on 12 Oct 06Yeah, I just wanted to see how fast it was too :)
Ben
on 12 Oct 06Wow, that IS fast
WOOO HOOO
on 12 Oct 06Deep down in Louisiana close the New Orleans Way back up in the woods among the evergreens There stood a blog cabin made of earth and wood Where lived a country boy named Johnny B Good Who never ever learned to read or write so well But he could play the guitar just like ringin a bell
Mark
on 12 Oct 06Good job, guys. I am looking forward to seeing some of the ‘coming’ features. We (at 42squared) are actually working on a CMS to run our blog as well as roll into some future projects. We plan on releasing ours, however. It will be interesting to see if your planned feature set is anything like what we come up with.
Long live 37 Signals and Blog Cabin! Good luck and keep up the good work.
Brandon
on 12 Oct 06Looks good. I’m going to give this a try myself sometime soon.
Josh
on 12 Oct 06Well, it certainly is faster. But… I just got all of today’s posts through my RSS reader for a second time—except this time they didn’t actually load (the links were like ”/svn/posts/post-name” rather than having the full URL). Not sure if that was a feedburner hiccup or something with your new software.
(For reference, I am using Thunderbird as my RSS reader.)
Jacob
on 12 Oct 06I too am having trouble accessing posts from the RSS feed.
Michael
on 12 Oct 06Fast?
MM
on 13 Oct 06There was an issue with the RSS feed. Should be fixed now. Thanks.
--Josh
on 13 Oct 06Testing to see if my double dashes still causes problems.
--Josh
on 13 Oct 06Nope, the double dashes cause no problems and the comment posts super-fast. Nicely done guys.
Stevan
on 13 Oct 06Yep, RSS Works fine now.
Mike Rundle
on 13 Oct 06Cool!
indi
on 13 Oct 06heh-heh … all this time I trhought it was just me
Marvin Miller
on 13 Oct 06sigh In my search for the best possible blog software, I kept coming up short and I have said several times, “If only the 37Signals guys would do something…” And you’ve done it, yet you’re telling us its nothing much—despite cool name and 37s genes.
Bah. Mephisto, perhaps? Or is there a blog software that allows an idiot (non-CSS expert) to easily edit, drag column width, move modules, change type and colors on the fly? WordPress, no. MovableType, no. What else?
Josh
on 13 Oct 06Hmm, I just got onto my laptop after supper and noticed I did get all 6 of todays posts via the RSS a third time (around 8pm EST), but perhaps that was when you were fiddling with the feed.
Also, if you are going to require the http:// in the URL field, you might want to prepopulate it with that, otherwise you’ll end up with links like Marvin’s there. ;)
Matt Johnson
on 13 Oct 06Ah, I can already feel the speediness that is the Blog Cabin.
sinker
on 13 Oct 06With 99 comments, I can’t read ‘em all (sorry), but really—why not release the product? Or share the code?
Joe Ruby
on 13 Oct 06Let’s see just how fast commenting is now…
Joe Ruby
on 13 Oct 06...wow!
ben
on 13 Oct 06well duh, had to try it after all those others suggesting as well.
Anonymous Coward
on 13 Oct 06test
Anonymous Coward
on 13 Oct 06Where’s the party at?
Anil
on 13 Oct 06I work with the Movable Type team, and it’s probably more fair to say that MT as 37s had it configured had slowed down in their environment. There’s simply no application which generates static pages that can run in a default configuration for years on end without needing to have some maintenance once in a while.
But MT can absolutely be configured to do high-volume, scalable blogging, even in a dynamic config as SVN is now, and thousands of companies are doing just that. That’s not a dig on either MT or on Blog Cabin, and I’m sure the 37s team would concede they had more interest in using the Rails tools they’re familiar with than in optimizing the performance of a large scale MT install, which isn’t code the’yre as familiar with.
For normal companies that just want a blog and don’t have genius programmers handy, they’d probably rather just optmize MT. So I don’t think the software or platform’s the issue so much as business needs vs. technical resources.
Pete Yandell
on 13 Oct 06We’ve also rolled our own blog in Rails, partly as an exercise, and partly parly because it’s so easy to do that, for our simple needs, it’s actually less painful than dealing with an existing blog’s templating system.
Our blog lives here and I’m writing about features as we add them.
Phil
on 13 Oct 06As of right now (Thur night 11:30pm PST) your feed omits post authors, even though it looks to still be tracking ‘em here on the HTML interface.
That was useful metadata.
Chris McElligott
on 13 Oct 06If you want a simple, ROR powered blog—basically what Jason has described check out simplelog.net
I’ve been playing with it locally and I’m in love with it’s simplicity and theme system.
dandan
on 13 Oct 06Goodskillz.
stelios
on 13 Oct 06ok! Looks good!
Chriztian Steinmeier
on 13 Oct 06I just want to see the Logo – u know, a Cabin inside a snow-whatchama-call-it-thingy… tell me u have it somewhere in Campfire. Ryan just couldn’t help it, I know. Maybe even Jamis???
[wanders off to antiques store… ]
Olav
on 13 Oct 06Great news, ‘twas about time. ;)
Anonymous Coward
on 13 Oct 06I disagree completely. All of 6A’s recommendations for making a large install of MT work both require very advanced system administration knowledge and are relatively new. Further, I’m not sure about everyone else, but I find it much easier to read and fix bugs in Rails code than Perl.
I’m no genius programmer. But I do work w/ a large install of Movable Type deployed using the best practices 6A has laid out, and I’m also ready for a change.
Josh Poulson
on 13 Oct 06My biggest complaint about MT has been its hardcoded HTML-invalid comment form that even MT’s default templates don’t use on individual post pages. Even so, I’ve been using MT for years and it keeps getting better.
I used to have a hand-coded blog system, and I had hoped using MT would keep me up to date with the latest protocols. For the most part it’s worked.
JF
on 13 Oct 06That’s not a dig on either MT or on Blog Cabin, and I’m sure the 37s team would concede they had more interest in using the Rails tools they’re familiar with than in optimizing the performance of a large scale MT install, which isn’t code the’yre as familiar with.
Anil is right. We just got to the point where it was easier to roll our own in Rails that make changes to our MT configuration.
Further, there’s some other stuff we have planned for SvN that would have required extensive customization of MT in a few months. We just weren’t feeling comfortable with that.
So it was basically a matter of this being the right time to break off and roll our own.
MT served us well for many years. That’s more than I can say about most software.
Eamon
on 13 Oct 06Can you add the current comment count back to each entry’s link on the main page? It used to be that the URL would change every time someone commented which, combined with the :visited style, made it really easy to see if there’d been any new comments since the last viewing. I loved that feature.
Test
on 13 Oct 06test of speed
gwg
on 13 Oct 06Maybe I’m crazy, but the RSS feed displays new posts that aren’t here.
4 posts display in the RSS feed that are newer than this:
“YouTube…” “Recent Job…” “Fireside Chat..” “Ergonomic Keyboard…”
Anyone else have this problem?
gwg
on 13 Oct 06Update:
If I go to 37/svn/posts
I see the full blog. Maybe I’m just having a caching issue with all the old links to svn?
gwg
Don Schenck
on 13 Oct 06I’m STILL trying to decide which new car to buy. Saab 93? BMW 3-series? Audi? Or even a Hyundai Sonata (don’t laugh until you’ve driven one).
Hmmmm …
Don Schenck
on 13 Oct 06Wow … fast! I LIKE the improvements here. Yellow fade is a nice touch.
JF
on 13 Oct 06Don is considering an Audi? OMFG.
Fitz
on 13 Oct 06Yup…pretty snappy!
Don Schenck
on 13 Oct 06Jason—one of my customers is a leasing company, and this two year-old A4 was returned to them and it’s calling my name. I park my old Saab next to it every morning.
Who knows.
Oh; it’s a Quattro :-)
Eamon
on 13 Oct 06Hooray! You made the change!
Joe Ruby
on 13 Oct 06gwg – use the Feedburner feed. The index.xml doesn’t seem to be getting updated anymore…
pwb
on 13 Oct 06Speed check.
Anonymous Coward
on 13 Oct 06Why is MT so slow? Shouldn’t saving a comment be pretty straightforward?
John
on 13 Oct 06Get real! Wouldn’t the “less software” solution be to just create a new blog on your existing Movable Type installation without any comments or posts? If you include copying the design templates it would take, like 2 whole minutes. Then just kick back and enjoy the blazing new response times!
Wes
on 13 Oct 06I’m subscribed to the feedburner feed, but I don’t see times on the feed anymore. I scanned the previous comments, but didn’t see anything about this.
If I missed it, sorry for the double post.
Brendan
on 13 Oct 0637s team,
Congrats on the implementation of Blog Cabin. I hadn’t visited the site in a couple days and began reading from the top as I usually do. It wasn’t until I hit this post that I knew anything had changed. Seemless transition for the end user – just like it should be.
Jon
on 14 Oct 06Just testing the comments.
Anonymous Coward
on 14 Oct 06test
Chuck Cheeze
on 14 Oct 06No wonder Sunrise isn’t out yet- wasting resources on Blog Cabin, for shame… ;-)
cool
on 14 Oct 06cool
Alisdair McDiarmid
on 14 Oct 06Your feed is broken, so it doesn’t work in NewsFire. The problem is in the date format:
http://feedvalidator.org/check.cgi?url=http%3A%2F%2Ffeeds.feedburner.com%2F37signals%2FbeMH
Arpan
on 14 Oct 06Have to try this out.
evariste
on 14 Oct 06Testing speed…
evariste
on 14 Oct 06Astonishingly fast!
Tracy says: Get real! It’s only fair to brag when this new system also holds tens of thousands of posts…
Doubt it. Ever notice how fast backpack and the other products are despite having (probably) millions of users and tens of millions of database rows? These guys know fast.
As for “tens of thousands”, it’s a pathetically small number. Why should anything be slow with tens of thousands of posts, let alone a widely-deployed and popular blogging app? Mainstream databases, open source and proprietary, are highly tuned machines that do not slow down under such trifling conditions.
Movable Type’s just not aging very gracefully, and in fact is an ulcer on the internet’s bum at this point. I for one am heartily sick of the product’s poor design and hunger for memory, CPU time, and system resources, and poor resiliency characteristics when under attack by spammers.
I administer a few MT blogs that are by no means large-scale, but they are by every means plagued with problem upon problem, from performance and responsiveness to spam to you-name-it. I wrote a bit of a screed when MT 3.2 came out complaining about poor design decisions in their forums, and newer versions have not even approached solving them.
They’re not great at communication, either, except that Anil likes to pop up in any blog where MT’s criticized to put up a defense. It is his job, after all. As an example of poor communication, on the 26th of September the MT team ordered everyone to upgrade to the latest version immediately, terming it a “mandatory” upgrade, because of cross-site scripting vulnerabilities.
I rushed to upgrade the largest blog I admin which still uses MT (not for much longer, thank goodness-a TurboGears based replacement is in the works)-I’d been avoiding upgrades because of the way they abandoned the perfectly serviceable Blacklist in favor of their crummy “Spam Rating Framework”, but now we’re stuck with it. They promised another post, detailing the vulnerabilities that were fixed, within a “couple of days” (on 9/26 mind you; it’s now 10/14). Nothing forthcoming yet, but I’m not surprised.
I can’t wait for MT to disappear up the enterprise’s fundament. It’s the only market they really cater to with any enthusiasm anyway, the “enterprise”. Hobbyist, non-technical bloggers on underpowered shared hosting are better served by Blogger or WordPress, sad to say. And folks like the 37Signals crew and Jeff Croft can write their own. The sun has set on Movable Type.
Alexandre Simard
on 14 Oct 06OK, this bug report should have gone in an email, but I want to see the speed too. The job ad link no longer works: it points to the www.37signals.com domain instead of job.37signals.com.
Igwe
on 15 Oct 06A lot faster than the old blog
Michael
on 16 Oct 06Test of speed….
zo
on 16 Oct 06I never knew quite how much I want to blog with Blog Cabin until this moment … and now, of course, I will never be happy unless I can try a demo and at least suffer the disappointment of every other demo out there, oh please.
Si
on 16 Oct 06Great stuff! Keep up the good work :D
JB
on 16 Oct 06Hi! Pitty you’re forcing your readers to do it ‘on-line’ with that ‘media=”screen”’ statement…
I know it is not… ‘greenish’, but I still print the posts deserving more attention than just a quick scan for later reading. With that statement, printings just get as uggly as printing defualts. You could either not restrict the stylesheet to ‘screen’ (as it was before) or provide a nice ‘media=”print”’ stylesheet, please…
Thanks, JB
Jake
on 16 Oct 06MT can absolutely be configured to do high-volume, scalable blogging…
Slightly OT, but until MT introduces pagination of category archive pages, it really isn’t scalable for people producing lots of entries.
(Yes, I tried rolling my own with Smarty. Unfortunately, “lastn” makes “sortby” useless. You can only paginate archive pages if you display entries chronologically.)
txillida
on 16 Oct 06Speed test form Europe
Matt
on 18 Oct 06I’m puzzled how you can say you’re faster now, but your new engine isn’t loaded with all the old data. You must be super confident that in 10,000 comments time you’ll still be as fast. Or maybe you’ve just got all that time to make sure?
This discussion is closed.