Radio.active

I have a suggestion for working around the serious problems with Radio's FTP function. Like others, I've been struggling with Radio's dysfunctional FTP upstream drivers while trying to move this weblog to my own domain. Radio's whole FTP driver structure is broken and needs to be fixed, but that probably won't happen

The main symptom seems to be Radio locking up during the upstream function, failing to send any data but churning away at 100% CPU usage for hours at a time. The only fix seems to be shutting down Radio and restarting, at which time Radio will pickup where it left off on the upstream process. I'm wondering if one of the Radio scripting gurus could write some sort of FTP monitor/restart script similar to Andy Fragen's Keep Web Server Up tool.

Keep Web Server Up monitors and restarts Radio's web server function under Mac OS X, which seems to have a habit of killing the Web Server service in Radio for no good reason. The FTP problem is probably more complicated since FTP isn't a separate Radio service that can be easily stopped and started. Maybe the solution has to run as some sort of external service. I don't know. But it's bound to be doable.

The other real problem is Radio sucking CPU cycles just querying for new files. When Radio uses the XML Storage System method it's CPU load for background upstreaming functions are trivial. But switch to FTP and the CPU pegs at 100% every five seconds. Radio basically takes a full 20% of CPU capacity to do nothing but monitor folders for FTP upstream. This can be stopped by turning the background upstream function off, or setting it to upstream only after publishing. But that's less convenient than leaving Radio's publish service on all the time.