Smart Rebuild - Faster Category Rebuilds

Mark — 2006-07-31T15:41:12-05:00

Introducing Smart Rebuild, a plugin for Movable Type that speeds up rebuilding. Version 1.0 of this plugin specifically addresses the speed of rebuilding category archives from the MT admin interface.

Do you need this?

If category rebuilds are taking a long time, you may want to try Smart Rebuild.

If you are getting 500 - Internal Server Errors when rebuilding, you may want to try Smart Rebuild.

If you have a blog with a large number of entries and/or a large number of categories (or both), you may want to try Smart Rebuild.

Download Now

SmartRebuild.zip

Installation:

1. Expand zip file and upload the "Smart Rebuild" directory to your "plugins" directory within Movable Type (this is often something like /cgi-bin/mt/plugins).

2. Try it by clicking the "rebuild site" button from the left menu and choose "Rebuild All Files" or "Rebuild Category Archives Only".

You may want to time your category rebuilds before installing the plugin, and then again after you install it. This will help give you a sense of the improvement, which will vary depending on your site.

Tested with MT 3.2 and 3.31.

Future versions of Smart Rebuild may contain further rebuild optimizations.

Smart Rebuild - Faster Category Rebuilds

Bobb Menk — 2006-08-17T16:01:44-05:00

This does the build a lot faster but appears to make some assumptions about the results that I don't quite understand. All the index pages get output as index.html.static rather than as simple index.html - is that by design? Some php convention perhaps? For a variety of reasons my blogs need to be output as static pages not dynamic. Can this be tweaked to allow for that? Or will it just not work in my situation.

Thanks.

Smart Rebuild - Faster Category Rebuilds

Mark Carey — 2006-08-18T06:36:16-05:00

Bobb,

This plugin should not cause index pages to get output as you indicate. I use it on many blogs and they are 100% static publishing. This plugin has nothing to do with PHP publishing, and in fact, the current version only addresses category rebuilds, not indexes, as you mentioned.

What are the publishing settings for the blog in question (all static or "set each templates build options separately")? If you can provide additional details, that would help. I reall can think of how this plugin could be causing this problem, but if it is, I would really like to fix it.

Smart Rebuild - Faster Category Rebuilds

Bobb Menk — 2006-08-18T15:04:21-05:00

Mark

Thanks for the response - you were right. The problem was caused by me forgetting that I had experimented with dynamic php building of this on my development server and forgotten to reset the config.

So I changed it all back to static publishing and ran it with Smart Rebuild. While I saw some speed up in the category rebuilds, I didn't notice any real difference in the time it took for the individual page rebuilds.

Should I expect to see an improvement on the individual page rebuilds? Or does this just operate on the categories?

Thanks. Sorry for the initial confusion.

Bobb Menk

Smart Rebuild - Faster Category Rebuilds

Mark Carey — 2006-08-18T15:36:50-05:00

Hi Bobb,

As I mentioned in the orginal entry above - and in my reply to you - the current version of this plugin only addresses category rebuilds. This version won't improve individual archives building. I am currently working on a new version that I hope will speed up individual archive rebuilding. Stay tuned...

Smart Rebuild - Faster Category Rebuilds

David — 2006-08-20T17:42:11-05:00

Has anyone found that this plugin does, actually, nothing? And that you have the same timeout problems as before?

Smart Rebuild - Faster Category Rebuilds

Mark Carey — 2006-08-21T10:04:22-05:00

David, the performance improvement of this plugin will be more noticeable on some blogs than others. As mentioned above, blogs with a large number of entries will show more improvement that blogs will few entries. Also note that this plugin speeds category rebuilds, but does not (yet) speed up the rebuilding of other types of archives.

The best way to test the performace impact is to first disable the plugin and choose "rebuild files" and then "Rebuild category Archives", and time how long it takes to complete. Then, enable the plugin and do the same.

Smart Rebuild - Faster Category Rebuilds

dm — 2008-01-14T01:11:54-05:00

Curious as to if this will be changed for MT4 and made to combat Internal Server Errors for MT4 too (getting a lot of those where rebuilds are timing out).

I relied on this a bit back in MT3.x.

Currently getting caught on index rebuilds of all things. heh.

Smart Rebuild - Faster Category Rebuilds

Mark Carey — 2008-01-14T07:54:12-05:00

dm, With respect to category rebuilds, MT4 has implemented same changes that are very similar to those provided by the Smart Rebuild plugin. So, from that perspective, this plugin is not necessary in MT4.

That said, I think there are plenty of opportunities to improve rebuild speed, so an MT4 version of Smart Rebuild is not out of the question, but it would be an entirely different beast under the hood.

Smart Rebuild - Faster Category Rebuilds

dm — 2008-01-14T17:37:26-05:00

Hmm... okay. I'm just wondering mainly because I'm getting server timeouts (Internal Server Error: Error 500) due to the way MT builds the index in a bundle, instead of one at a time which seems to work fine.

I don't want to hack the actual code so I'm curious as to if taking your Smart Rebuild code and hacking it to run rebuilds of the indexes one at a time, if that would speed it up. I think the process is similar to the way you size chunked the category rebuilds.

Smart Rebuild - Faster Category Rebuilds

شات صوتي — 2010-01-20T08:01:27-05:00

which seems to work fine