Ack! This problem has been driving us nuts for weeks and weeks. Something sets off the newest versions of Movable Type 4.x (a.k.a. "MT") and it will start eating server memory in big mouthfuls until there's no space for anything else to run.
It's very frustrating -- as you probably know if you've been looking for a fix. It will cause a busy server to crash if you don't catch it in time. And it just isn't covered in the MT documentation
Good news: We found a solution! Probably the solution, in fact.
It's a bit of a mystery as to why it i and, if you don't use graphics plugins or Captcha in your MT setup, it may look like it makes no sense whatsoever. But believe me, this is it:
Install or reinstall ImageMagick on your server.
Even if you don't use ImageMagick -- believe me, this is the problem. Read on....
When you (re)install it, be absolutely sure to run the Perl "Perlmagick" make at the end of the process. For a great installation how-to go to this page by Anu Gupta at DigitalQuery: Movable Type and Image::Magick -
Credit where credit is due:
After weeks of bashing our brains out on this, we stumbled upon yet another troubled user on the Sixapart support forum but with a different way of describing the problem. (We've found a lot of other folks using our words for it too -- including the blue ones.)
Anyway; fortunately for that user and for us, another forum member, Yntouse, posted the solution with some backup from the above mentioned Anu.gupta. It was so exactly our problem that I immediately checked our test server's Apache error log for messages about "Deep recursion on subroutine "Image::Magick...." (see the second post in the thread). Tah dah!
We had a current ImageMagick on that server and working for other (Perl-based) systems just fine -- AND we don't use anything in MT that should require it! -- but I went ahead and installed a slightly newer one -- being very sure to run the Perlmagick install too.
It's a lenghty compile but once it was done the MT problem was gone. Poof. Gone.
I checked the Apache error logs on our production server but (NOTE:) I did NOT find the same error message. That was a little frustrating, I must say, but I went ahead and reinstalled Image::Magick and PerlMagick and again, like magic, the problem is GONE. Fantastic.
Many parts of MT were being affected by this. Ironically, you can't run the MT system check from the dashboard while you're experiencing this problem as your MT.cgi system will dive into the crushing ImageMagick memory eating loop of death. You can, however, safely run mt-check.cgi directly from your web browser as: http://www.yourdomainhere.com/mt/mt-check.cgi. Run that and look to see if MT thinks that you don't have ImageMagick installed. If that's the case then this is probably the fix for you!
Good luck!
And HUGE thanks to Anu Gupta and "Yntouse". Whew!
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