Static publishing doesn't scale?

The Movable Type installation for this site is starting to get a bit difficult to maintain, to the point that I can no longer publish pages from the web interface. Dreamhost, perhaps specifically targeting MT installations, or perhaps not, has their web servers configured to kill the publishing process before it can complete. The background process that publishes new articles every morning still gets the job done, so it's clearly just the web server that's giving up early.

Unfortunately, this means approving comments is nearly impossible now. I still receive the comments by email, so by all means continue to post if you're so inclined. Comments posted to my continuously popular article on disabling shuffle and repeat modes on an iPhone always make my day. I just can't promise they'll all make it to the site. I've removed the "chatter" box from the sidebar, at least temporarily. That doesn't help with publishing, unfortunately, but should make the overall experience less disappointing.

I used to think it crazy that people would dynamically generate pages from the database on every request when the content changes almost never, with no caching layer, just because PHP made it easy to do. It turns out it is static page generation that doesn't scale, at least within a web UI and on 1990's architecture. I'll come up with something new next time I get a chance, which at this rate will be 2009 at the earliest.