Well, I’ve made more progress.  I can now successfully build my main indexes and entries statically.  This means that comments will show up immediately now.  I’m still running the monthly and category archives through the publish queue, though.  I don’t think that’s a bad thing.

To get things to work better, I’ve made a few changes, including caching widgets, enabling some widgets as server-side includes (I discovered the beauty of SSI when I started Ingvi’s Corner, and am glad to use them here), and changed my archive widgets so they don’t display a count for each category/monthly archive.  (I figure part of the problem was that trying to generate this data for each page was really thrashing the script’s interface to the database during a database.)  Hopefully, all of these things will add up to much better experience for both myself and my readers.

I’m also starting to realize the MT is becoming an extremely powerful system.  In some ways, I suspect it’s more than I really need.  I’m just a simple blogger, and I’ve found myself spending more time that I planned tweaking MT to get performance and stability.  In some ways, it’s enough to make me consider going back to Typepad or blogger, where someone else can worry about most of that stuff.  But I like running my own blog software, so I don’t foresee that happening.  Besides, who knows, I might find benefits to the increased power.

(Special thanks to Jon Sullivan for providing the public doman image used in this post.)