It appears that the world is slowly discovering MusicBrainz. Last month we pushed nearly 2M pages per day and smoke is pouring out of our poor search server. Fortunately we have some money in the bank so, the board of directors approved the purchase a new RAM-heavy server for use as our new search server. Then yesterday, Matthew Mullenweg of WordPress fame donated $5000 to the MetaBrainz Foundation!! That nicely covers the costs of our new search server (~$3000) and then some.
I’m also working on improving the search server so that it runs more efficiently and that we get fewer timeout errors. Things improved yesterday when I redirected all web-based searches to our new server. I hope to cut over the rest of the search traffic (web service traffic) to a better suited server later this afternoon.
In other words — I’m working hard to make sure the site stays responsive, even under the growing loads. Things should improve much more once we can deploy the new server mid-next week.
Stay tuned for more details on the changes on the search server!
MetaBrainz Blog 
That was awful charitable of Mr. Mullenweg. 🙂
Double thanks to Matt: for offering us WordPress, and now a fine searching service (and then some 😉
And huge thanks to you, Rob, for your dedication.
Wow, what awesome news! Cheers to Matthew for his extremely generous donation and to Rob for all his hard work with MB!
-Aaron