Today I took a waist-deep plunge into the mud puddle that is FastCGI. I use this metaphor advisedly, because the puddle didn’t look very deep (mud puddles never do), and it wasn’t really very deep (they rarely are), but it was deeper than I thought at first (as one invariably discovers after ruining one’s shoes). I’ll spare you the full discussion of my failed attempts; the upshot is that the site is now a lot faster when a script is executed (e.g., when a search is performed), thanks to some clever techniques employed by FastCGI. In case you care to replicate my results, keep on reading.
The internet abounds with guides to installing FastCGI for MovableType on DreamHost, and some of them are close to correct, but none of them told me quite what I needed to know. For the record, I had to
Install FastCGI for perl (Dreamhost enables it for ruby and python, but not perl). Note that
/home/ben/benjamn.com/libis where my installation of MovableType looks for libraries. Alter yourPREFIXif yourliblives elsewhere.mkdir -p ~/src && cd ~/src curl -O http://search.cpan.org/CPAN/authors/id/S/SK/SKIMO/FCGI-0.67.tar.gz tar zxvf FCGI-0.67.tar.gz cd FCGI-0.67 perl Makefile.pl PREFIX=/home/ben/benjamn.com/ --use-installed make && make test && make installInstall the latest perl wrapper for SQLite (since I use SQLite for my database). Nearly the same as above, but using a different .tar.gz file:
http://search.cpan.org/CPAN/authors/id/M/MS/MSERGEANT/DBD-SQLite-1.14.tar.gzAdd the following section to my mt-config.cgi file:
##### FastCGI ##### AdminScript mt.fcgi CommentScript mt-comments.fcgi TrackbackScript mt-tb.fcgi SearchScript mt-search.fcgi ViewScript mt-view.fcgi XMLRPCScript mt-xmlrpc.fcgi AtomScript mt-atom.fcgi UpgradeScript mt-upgrade.fcgi ActivityFeedScript mt-feed.fcgi LaunchBackgroundTasks 0For each of the .fcgi filenames listed in the previous step, rename the corresponding .cgi file to have the .fcgi extension.
Now I use /mt.fcgi to access the administrative interface, and everything else just works (quickly).
thanks! I'm on dreamhost too and after seeing MT on your site, I'm giving it a try too :).