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December 29, 2005

MOVABLE TYPE'S 500 INTERNAL SERVER ERRORS ARE NO MATCH FOR ME!11 ONE

If only I knew it were that simple. Sigh.

So I was wrestling with the problem of Movable Type chucking out "500 Internal Server Error"s for the longest time when rebuilding all the entries on my photo album (being, as it is, about 100 photos and growing! plug plug!). Hitting F5 has sometimes done the trick, but sometimes not. However, in a moment of CGI whimsy as it were, I stumbled upon a solution. Open up your Movable Type config file (called mt.cfg here, but I've seen other names for it). Find a line that reads something like this:

# EntriesPerRebuild 40

Uncomment it and change it to read thusly:

EntriesPerRebuild 15

And right with thine world shall all be thereafter. To hazard a guess as to why this works, it's probably because rebuilding 40 (the default) entries on a loaded down system takes a long time, and some servers will forcibly kill CGI scripts if they do not finish executing after a certain, reasonable number of seconds. Reducing it from 40 to 15 (a number you should experiment with if it doesn't work for you) will reduce the time it takes to execute and should, therefore, get rid of the 500 error.

Woot. :D

Posted by Lewis at December 29, 2005 02:46 AM