Movable Type Troubleshooting
From DreamHost
First, check your resource reports to see which part of Movable Type is being troublesome. If it's mt-comments.cgi, either you have a very popular blog and many people feel the need to comment on your posts, or, more than likely, you have been attacked by pesky comment spammers. Do not fret! Sixapart has released a plugin you can install easily to dissuade comment spammers.
There are many anti-spam plugins available (http://www.sixapart.com/pronet/plugins/antispam/index.html), however the most popular and the most effective appears to be Blacklist (http://www.sixapart.com/pronet/plugins/plugin/blacklist.html). Download the plugin, upload it to your site, follow the directions made available by the package, and that should solve your problem! If you're having trouble getting the plugin to work, Sixapart does provide many options for support for their product - documentation, a knowledge base, forums, etc. You can find their support offerings at http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/support.
If the process at the top of your resource report is mt.cgi or mt-tb.cgi, it could be that publishing is slow and building the archives is causing some problems. Sixapart has a great article on how to speed this process up at http://www.sixapart.com/pronet/articles/how_to_speed_up.html.
If Movable Type is still using a lot of resources, it could be that your blog has become very popular. While our shared hosting servers are very good at handling quite a bit of traffic from our customers, there does come a point sometimes where a site will outgrow shared hosting and need to move onto the next step - a shiny new Dedicated server!
