Plaidophile

So, Dreamhost has gotten a lot more aggressive about killing RAM and CPU-using processes, and according to support it's based on the total resource usage by the user, not just on a per-process basis. That's reasonable. Movable Type, as it turns out, uses quite a lot of RAM while it's publishing an entry. (This was a problem on MT3 as well, which is what led me to upgrade to MT5 since I wasn't sure what was going on. MT5 makes the problem way worse but MT3 wasn't exactly clear of it either.)

For now I've disabled some of MT's performance optimizations (such as doing multiple forked processes for rebuilds) which has helped stability immensely but I do watch the mt.cgi process go and it comes dangerously close to the 100MB-or-so limit. DreamHost has recommended either switching to a virtual private server (where I'd have a guaranteed amount of RAM and no process killing) or switching to something other than Movable Type.

The VPS option is kind of tempting since then I could also run my own email infrastructure again (and it's not like I use my Google Apps stuff for anything other than email - all my calendars, contacts, Android market, etc. are on a normal gmail account) but it does cost $15/month for the lowest 300MB RAM option (which is probably enough for me but I'm not positive).

The other option is much more obnoxious, though. I have MT set up the way I like it (even post the MT5 upgrade), and WordPress would be a huge amount of work to switch over to (and frankly I'd rather just delete my blog than try to migrate to WP, or build my own custom-purpose CMS which would probably have a few advantages but there are so many other things I'd rather be working on).

For now I think I'll just see if MT5 works well enough with the low-performance configuration (so far it's no slower than MT3 was, at least) and only switch to a VPS if I really need to. Meanwhile I'm sure there's a lot of stuff I can do to simplify my templates, now that MT5 supports a lot of things I had to hack around on MT3.