migrating a movable type system, the replication way
Lately, I’ve been in
the business of migrating between hosting providers. We’re moving away
from the classic web host CentOS. The reason that CentOS became the web
host OS of choice in the middle of the decade still eludes. I just
imagine a some RHEL fan club being told to implement a linux web host
solution with no budget and CentOS was the fruit of that effort. Our new
host is of the new ultra-trendy VPS type. We chose slicehost on some
recommendations from friends. I host my own blog and some other stuff
on a VPS at vpslink.com. I fired it up with Intrepid Ibex (of course)
and started migrating stuff over the Ubuntu way.
That’s all well and good, but the reason I’m writing this is because I found a great way to move our largest system which is a family of blogs related to fresnobeehive.com. We’d been using movable type to publish blogs since version 2.x, and the new systems are running 4.x. Back then, the only publishing option was to physically build every page for the entire system ahead of time. That system works great when you have only a few hundred entries, but when you start getting into the 10s of thousands of entries, static publishing begins to break down a little. It takes most of a day to publish the entire site if you make a global template change. Combine this with the fact that we’re attempting to redesign the blogs during the move, and we’ve got a lot to juggle.
I was investigating some web site slowness for a
friend the other day. His company uses SugarCRM over https. He had been
complaining about slowness for over a year and I finally decided to give
it a thorough look. Since the sugar application makes heavy use of its
database backend, I decided to start there. Unfortunately mySQL’s slow
query log turned up nothing, except that the database was running about
as fast as you could possibly expect with the whole database buffered in
memory. I honestly didn’t think to check the web server itself because
I’ve never really had a measurable problem with that before, default web
server settings have always suited me fine in the past. Apparently all
bets are off when running under SSL…