Curious.  Why MySQL, and not Postgres?

That's a damned good question to tell the truth, especially considering that I've been known to rant and rave about MySQL in the past.  (At least now they finally added transactions. Only took them close to 4 versions to do so. <insert eye rolling here>)  It's probably just that out of the three databases I have used (Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL) MySQL is the only one I can get my hands on.

Know of any good comparisons between MySQL and PostgreSQL that are available?

Posted by g026r at 25 Fructidor CCXI 13:54 (2003/09/11)

No.  I'm only informed of propagandha from friends who claim that MySQL is the devil, and PostgreSQL is holy goodness.  I was actually looking at you for an informed opposing opinion, but oh well.

I'm more inclined to the 'MySQL is the devil' category myself, to tell the truth.
But then again, I have a habit of writing sub-selects when I do up programs, something which MySQL doesn't accept.

A bit of info (no idea on the age though) that I found over on a PHP forum stated that MySQL tends to have faster data access, however it suffers from a lack of features and doesn't scale as well for high traffic (i.e. in excess of 15 pages per second) sites.

PostgreSQL on the other hand is supposedly more feature rich and stabler, but suffers from slower data access times and arbitrary limits on the size of data stored in rows. It also scales better in that, although data access is slower, it never just gives up and stops allowing connections like MySQL will.

Again, I have no idea how relevant this is to current versions. It was talking about one of the 3.x releases of MySQL and the current production release is 4.0. So that means it is a little old, yet no idea exactly how old.

Posted by g026r at 25 Fructidor CCXI 17:10 (2003/09/11)

Speaking of speed issues, waiting for my previous comment to submit has made me realise that I really need to find someway to speed up Movable Type's CGI scripts on this machine.

Posted by g026r at 25 Fructidor CCXI 17:14 (2003/09/11)

Yeah, I've noticed that accessing the comments is a tad slow.

It should be a bit better now.
I've crossed my fingers and put the comment script so that it runs using mod_speedycgi as opposed to mod_cgi (along with a 12 hour wait period before it unloads from memory).

Can you notice a difference? And is it doing anything wonky?

Posted by g026r at 25 Fructidor CCXI 22:32 (2003/09/11)

The adding comments will still be a little slow, not sure why, but displaying them should be faster. (That one I can't figure out... I don't think it's loading any extra CGI scripts. I'll have to check.)

Right, so I think I know what the problem with submitting comments is.
Rather than display the page and keep on rebuilding the index in the background I would guess that it doesn't redisplay the popup window until after it has rebuilt all the static pages. Unfortunately this machine doesn't boast the fastest throughput in terms of disk speed, so that's the slow down in posting.

Posted by g026r at 25 Fructidor CCXI 22:33 (2003/09/11)

While there's little I can do about how long it takes to load the comments popup (doesn't seem too much worse than yours or Nancy's considering the difference in power between this machine and those two...at times anyways ), it should be a bit faster on the posting now. I'm shopping around for some more RAM to stick in this thing, keep it from spending so much time swapping to disk, which should hopefully provide an improvement.

Until then I've severely cut down on what gets rebuilt when you post a new comment. (It also necessitated what I'll call 'pulling a Peter', in that I've removed the individual entry links and archives and only have individual the monthly archive files now.)

Right, this is the third comment in a row. I'll stop talking to myself now.

Posted by g026r at 25 Fructidor CCXI 23:23 (2003/09/11)

Loading the comments was faster.  If submitting this one is abysmally slow, I'll let you know, otherwise I won't comment again.