As I've noted before, Movable Type is robust and rich in features, but really really slow.

I've wondered if it's something to do with using Berkeley DB. Some people on the MT support forum have claimed this is the case, but they have not impressed me as particularly knowledgable. Berkeley itself is very fast anyway, so it would have to be a problem with MT's use of it rather than Berkeley itself - though that is quite possible.

Anyway, there's a CGI script available in MT to convert from a Berkeley DB to MySQL or PostgreSQL. Two things to note: It only comes with the upgrade package, and not with the "full" version (minor oops), and it doesn't work (big oops).

Well, if you run it as the docs suggest, as a CGI program from your web browser, it will happily create the necessary tables in your SQL database and report that its work is done. Without, mind you, copying any of the data across.

If instead you run it from the command line, it will copy all your data, only very very slowly. It zips through the first part - I'm not sure exactly what that consisted of, but at least it was quick - but when it starts processing the entries it slows to a crawl. Crawwwwwwwwwl.

Once it's finished, which should be within the next 10 or 12 hours (seriously!), I'll rerun my little stress-test.

Oh, yes: I've written a template which exports your entire Movable Type system in a nice convenient format. Just the ticket if you want to move off MT and onto a more modern and efficient sytem. (Cough Minx cough.)

It takes two hours to run on mu.nu. That's on a lightly-loaded Athlon XP 2500+ with 1GB of memory.

Pfft. But at least it's better than mt-db2sql.cgi.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:24 AM | Comments (16) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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