Solving Movable Type’s 500 Internal Server Error During Rebuilds

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.