Help Make MT Even More Bulletproof

Some of the largest properties on the web power their sites using Movable Type. Not just the biggest blogs, but some of the biggest sites, period. You've seen 'em: The Washington Post, The Gothamist, Boing Boing, The Huffington Post and thousands more. Each of these sites rely on Movable Type to keep their web sites and blogs up and running, and one of our most important goals for Movable Type is to make sure your MT-powered site stays bullet-proof and reliable, no matter how big traffic gets. There are a few different features and capabilities of Movable Type that make this kind of scale possible:

• Background publishing and task management - Movable Type can offload the work-intensive parts of publishing to a separate task system which handles the heavy lifting.
• Multiple supported and scalable system architectures - Movable Type can run across a number of servers, splitting tasks like comment management and publishing onto their own dedicated infrastructure.
• Static publishing - Movable Type's has always defaulted to publishing completely static HTML pages, which serve up faster with less work needed by your web and database servers. And static pages are a lot more forgiving of transient problems with a database or application server.

This isn't just for the big sites -- any blogger can become a breakout, immensely popular web site on any given day. Even the smallest MT-powered sites Movable Type often become huge at a moment's notice. All it takes is one little blog post striking the fancy of the Digg community, and hundreds of thousands of new visitors can hit your site in just a couple of hours. On an even bigger scale, we see MT-powered sites like Radar show up on the Drudge Report, and traffic ends up peaking at ten times what the Digg homepage throws at your site. That's serious traffic.

So this is our number one priority for the next release of Movable Type. We are making sure the platform doesn't just remain the best-performing blogging system when under heavy traffic load, but that you never have to worry about letting your site's visitors down just when they're most interested in your content. You should never have to think about how many ads you would have shown those visitors.

We've got work to do to reach this goal -- MT is still far from perfect here. Our primary area of focus for the next release of Movable Type is on raw performance. Movable Type can be configured many different ways, and many web hosts haven't optimized their environments for running a serious Perl application like MT. Having a quickly-growing open source community also gives us the chance to collect more data from the users like you about what areas of the platform could perform better. So we're asking for your help. Here's what we need:

• Tell us about your pain. We have setup a special forum to help collect feedback from our users about the ways in which Movable Type does not perform up to your personal standards. We invite people to tell us not only about publishing and application performance, but also about any parts of Movable Type's user interface which don't feel responsive or fast enough while you're working.
• Send us data! Download and install a special version of MTOS (version 4.1.1) that we have prepared which contains an all-new performance monitoring framework. The new system will collect data to help us pin point the functions deep within the application that are most in need of optimization.