10 December 2001
GreyMatter Housekeeping
I had to do a little GreyMatter-related housekeeping tonight. Not to worry -- all of the previous weblog content are available via the archives page (long story).
Stephen Den Beste has wondered previously about the scalability of GreyMatter. For my own weblog installation (the journal is also powered by GreyMatter), I had been noticing a pretty significant slowdown in post times recently -- which didn't surprise me, since every "headline" on the blog is a single entry, and I had gotten up to nearly 4,000 entries. I don't know that GreyMatter was ever intended to handle so many pieces of data, and after I posted an entry today, I got an email from the owner/administrator of my hosting firm asking what I was doing to chew up so many resources (apparently I set off alarms with him today). He was very cool about it all (and he runs a great service btw!), but I told him I would do some tinkering tonight to try to get things under control.
Basically, I wound up setting up the weblog archives template so that it would refer to the "old" weblog archives, then I cleared out all the files and started over with a nearly "clean" installation of GreyMatter (retaining my templates and other previously configured author files). Had I planned ahead, I would have done this at the first of December so there wouldn't be two December "archives" but I didn't realize just how badly GM was going to start chewing on server resources.
At some point, I'm considering porting things over to Movable Type, which can handle multiple blogs (i.e. the journal AND the weblog, with only one installation) and, according to one of the authors, should be a little better in terms of scalability. But that's a project for the future (along with a site redesign and IkonBoard upgrade), as the dissertation is the focus right now.
[Posted @ 09:46 PM CST]
