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Movable Type's PublishQueue has some memory leakage, and running in daemon mode (for quicker response to rebuilds) highlights this problem.

So the solution (where solution = not particularly pretty workaround) is to run PQ under daemontools as per this writeup by Byrne Reese. This sets up a monitor which constantly scans for the PQ job and restarts it if it's not there.

Then create a cronjob that kills PQ every hour or so, using pkill

*/15 * * * * pkill -SIGINT run-periodic 

So, in this example, the cronjob runs pkill every 15 minutes and kills any processes that contain 'run-periodic'  in their name (run-periodic-tasks is the perl script that runs the PublishQueue workers).

The svscan process (part of the daemontools suite) notices instantly (within milliseconds) that the PQ task isn't running, and starts it up and memory is back to normal.

Now, this obviously isn't ideal, but the 6A guys (and some of the more Perl aware parts members (!) of the community) are well aware of the problem, and are looking at how to fix the leaky bits, as well as make the whole thing run better and faster. In the meantime, this is working well for me.

[Update - 6A have acknowledged the memory leaks issue in the latest MT 4.1 release notes and have advised that PublishQueue not be run in daemon mode, or with FastCGI - both of which are fairly essential. My workaround is even more valid now.

Also note the addition of the SIGINT signal to the pkill command - this is a less forceful shutdown and was recommended to me in the #movabletype IRC channel]

Smarta is an interesting new venture aimed at supporting entrepreneurs and helping them access the tools and information they need at various stages of the journey.

The site was launched today - it's a microsite for now, but will be enhanced dramatically over the coming months by the lovely people over at Splendid, and also features a blog built by me at digitalquery .

Lovely people to work with, and I'm sure this will be a really valuable resource, especially for those of us starting up.

I started this post over a year and a half ago, and it's languished as a draft in 3 different pieces of software (LiveWriter, WordPress and Movable Type), but today feels like a very good day to dust off the cobwebs and unleash it onto the world. (Although, actually, I only got one line into it before saving it as a draft...). Anyway, without further ado, the post - such as it was !

JP Ragaswami points to Tara Hunt talking about aggregating her bits and pieces strewn over the web.

So - why post now ? Well - in the last year and a half, many personal aggregation / lifestreaming services have sprung up, but today (and the reason I've finally gotten round to doing something with this post), SixApart released Action Streams - a quite excellent personal aggregation plugin for Movable Type 4. Byrne Reese also blogged about it over on majordojo.

Installing the plugin adds a simple interface for adding your activity from other sites, with prebuilt support for the most popular. It's a relatively straightforward process, although the template changes might put off people with no experience of MT, but 10 minutes of template changes was all it took for me to get my lifestream on this site - check it out here. You do need to be able to run a scheduled task to get it to update - but that shouldn't be an issue for any decent host.

Pretty simple, and plays nicely with the Universal Template Set. There's some good stuff coming out of  SixApart right now, and it feels like MT is on a bit of a roll.

I've just moved this site from Wordpress over to the latest build of Movable Type 4.1, using the new Universal Templates.

I've also decided to retire my old blog - scalefree, and have imported all the content across to here - I'll be redirecting everything from scalefree shortly.

MT4.1 really rocks - and the new template set mechanism will allow for Wordpress-like easy styling - and enabled me to get this complete site up and running in a couple of hours.

Contact me if you want more information, or if you'd like a site like this for yourself !

I've recently started to get a lot of comment spam forwarded to me for moderation, which means that Akismet can't decide what to do. This might be because I've recently posted here again, after an over-long break from blogging.

Rather than continue to plough through hundreds of spam comments a week, I'm taking the simpler path and have installed the rather wonderful Comment Timeout plugin. Essentially this closes comments on old posts, but generally does so relative to the last approved comment - so old posts that are still generating some worthwhile conversation won't get shut down.

We'll see how it goes, but I think this will help a lot.

[tags]spam, comments, wordpress, blogging, plugins [/tags]

SixApart have announced that Chris Alden is the new Chairman and CEO. Mena Trott makes a rare posting on her corporate blog about the move, and Chris also posts about the change on his blog. I met Chris at the beginning of the year, while I was at Headshift, and was impressed - and I think having someone who has developed and innovated in the blogging space can only be good for SixApart. GigaOm and TechCrunch also have the announcement, and you can follow any reaction on Techmeme. [tags]SixApart, Movable Type, MovableType[/tags]