Solving Movable Type’s 500 Internal Server Error During Rebuilds

by Danny Sullivan on February 10, 2006

in Blogs & Feeds

If you’ve been using Internet Explorer to read the blog, good news. Articles are now left-justified, just like you read in a book. I wasn’t centering the text before as some type of artsy thing. There was a coding bug that I couldn’t correct because Movable Type was refusing to rebuild with my revised code. Thanks to my friend and kindly neighborhood web hosting operator Rob Mathews of Tiger Tech, it’s all solved.

Ages ago, Rob kept chanting in my ear “WordPress, WordPress, WordPress.” And I did like WordPress, when I looked at it way back when. Heck, I even donated to WordPress to support the project. But we use Movable Type on the SEW Blog, so I wanted to stay with what I know.

Still, the Movable Type madness was starting to get me down. As I emailed Rob:

If I try to rebuild my Individual Entries, I either get a 500 Internal Server error or things like:

  • Building entry ‘New Desperate Housewives, Over There & Battlestar Galactica Arrive In The UK’ failed: Build error in template ‘Individual Entry Archive’: Error in <MTInclude> tag: Can’t find included template module ‘Search’
  • Building entry ‘Spam Filtering Test Continues — Stats & Preparing To Test Whitelists ‘ failed: Build error in template ‘Individual Entry Archive’: Error in <MTInclude> tag: Can’t find included template module ‘Top Graphic’

The modules do exist, so I’m clueless. Can you spot anything?

I’ll pass along what Rob sent me, in case it’s useful to others and because his response made me laugh out loud.

Hmmm. Like many technical problems, this brings to mind the following conversation:

Q: “Is that a good siren?”
A: “You ever known a siren to be good, Mr. Simpson?”

Anyway, it looks like it’s running out of memory — while rebuilding those pages, the script grows to over 60 MB of RAM within a couple of seconds(!), which is Not Right.

From some searching around, it appears that this is a symptom of corrupted storage files. Several people seemed to suggest that the easy way to make it go away was to switch the storage mechanism to use MySQL instead of flat files (BerkeleyDB). Since the Movable Type folks helpfully supply a script to do exactly that, I tried it, just creating a MySQL database for it and updating the mt-cfg.cgi file to match. And — Voila!  It works fine with the exact same data in MySQL.

So my recommendation is to stick with MySQL and chalk the problem up to “some kind of stupid computer crap”, and I’ve made a note to recommend MySQL installations if anyone asks us.

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{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }

1 legionofangels April 27, 2008 at 7:50 pm

Hello,
I know this is kind of old, but where did you find the script to change the DB to a MYSQL for Movable Type.
thanks

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