Update: The move was postponed by approx. 24 hours, and has now been started.
Its been a rough week for MusicBrainz, that’s for sure. First off, about a week ago a post about MuiscBrainz bubbled to the top of digg.com and that sent masive waves of traffic to us. That died down later in the week until all those people came back on the weekend and overwhelmed the servers. Our puny, but trusted, web server zim is just stretched too thin to handle all the load thrown at it. I apologize for the down-time and random errors you’ve been seeing in the last week.
And all that is about to get worse, but then it should get much better. Today is the day that we’ll attempt to move into the new data center (colocation facility) here in SLO (San Luis Obispo, CA). Starting very shortly after this post we’ll take a stab at moving the site onto new servers that should at least double, if not triple our current capacity to handle traffic.
We expect this move to take nearly three hours, during which you should use our mirror servers (or the staging server) if you need your MusicBrainz fix:
Last, but not least, we have finally updated the test server with the next release scheduled to be released next sunday on 2006-03-05. This release includes:
- Many bug reports (see trac for a list of recently closed bugs)
- WikiDocs: The improved replacement to the first generation wiki documentation system
- Lucene search: A much improved search facility that is faster and vastly more accurate. This first version will not search for stop words or punctuation — we’ll improve this later.
- XML Web Service: The newly designed and much more efficient based on XML (not RDF!) goes into beta with this release. This new service is vastly improved over the last one and uses common tools and common best practices for web services. This service alone should improve the performance of our systems. For details see the web service documentation. (We’ll also have new native python bindings to go with these!)
We’ll get a much more detailed ChangeLog out as the week progresses. So, happy playing with the new features while we move the site!
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