The good news: Thanks to a lot of patience from the wonderful Adriaan and some great advice from the fantastic Ben Trott, we’ve figured out why I can’t always successfully post to my website from ecto.
The bad news: I don’t know if we’ll be able to fix it.
Pair.com has a program called The Reaper. It’s purpose is to protect their servers from runaway programs by killing off ones that use up too many resources. (Perhaps they should call it Tom Selleck.) One of the criteria is that a program cannot use more than 16MB of memory. MT-xmlrpc.cgi, the perl script that handles remote posting for Movable Type, is often hitting that 16MB barrier and getting killed by The Reaper.
I have held a lengthy email discussion with various Pair support staff about this with a final plea to look into increasing this memory limit. They assured me that my request was passed on to the appropriate people for consideration.
What would be great is if other pair.com users would step up and say “Hey, I think it would rock if the memory limit was increased to 24MB!” Or even better since I don’t really know how much memory is need for XML-RPC, “Hey, I would be swell if we had enough memory to run MT, including XML-RPC, without getting a visit from The Reaper.”