MetaBrainz Foundation Community Blog
Yesterday we talked about rolling out our throttling based on User-Agent strings. A few minutes ago we pushed this feature live on our servers so now the updated rules are in effect. python-musicbrainz/0.7.3 users are now allowed 500 requests every 10 seconds and every single one of these requests is constantly being used. No surprise here. 🙂
For the exact details on what is throttled and how to get around your application being throttled, see our rate limiting documentation.
We’ve just added a page that documents what we’re currently blocking on our Web Service. We hope to lift the block on python-musicbrainz/0.7.3 tomorrow and instead throttle the number of requests it can make in a given period of time.
I’ll post another entry once we’re done with making those changes.
It seems that there wasn’t nearly enough consensus about the schema change release as I had expected. We’re going to skip all of the tickets, with the exception of the MBS-3693 ticket.
This really makes the January 12 release a mini-schema change release. Should be quick and painless. 🙂
One of the issues raised at the last summit was that our customers could use more time to prepare for schema change releases, since they require engineering effort on their part. In an effort to meet our customer’s needs we’re going to a set schedule for schema change releases. Going forward we’re going to have two schema change releases per year: On or about 15 May and on or about 15 October.
We’ve picked these two dates as dates that have the least amount of impact from holidays and people taking holidays. Most companies have normal working schedules around these dates, which should allow companies to dedicate the required resources to handle our schema changes.
However, we have one significant change that we need to push out on a more timely basis than May of next year. For that reason we’re going to plan a one-time exception to our new schedule for 12 January 2012. You can see the tickets we’ve scheduled for release in January in this schema change milestone.
We’ve already created release versions in Jira for all of the schema change releases in 2012. As we go through the year we’re going to add tickets to that milestone. Of course, we’re going to make lots of noise as these schema change release dates approach. We’re going to post a list of tickets that will be included no later than a month before the release.
Any questions? Ask them in the comments!
We’ve just updated our search server with the latest changes and bug fixes!
This update to the Search Server finally solves the search for artist “!!!” problem properly, should now be able to find just about any artist, release, etc that contain any crazy character combination. Also you can now search for number of releases in release groups and artists with unknown gender. The code base has now been updated to Lucene 3.4, which was the latest available when these changes were made (its at 3.5 now).
Thanks for your hard work on this Paul!
An application that uses our python-musicbrainz/0.7.3 client library has been putting undue load on our servers all at once. This application looks up something at MusicBrainz at 03:00UTC causing our servers to be overloaded at that time each day.
To protect our servers from being overloaded we’re going to block this application from 3:00 UTC – 4:00 UTC. We’re hoping that this will alllow us to identify the application and start a dialog with the application authors. Once we have established communication with the authors and worked up a plan to fix this, we’re going to release the block.
We really dislike blocking applications, but if applications are being inconsiderate of our resources, we’re left with few options. We hope to hear from the application authors soon so we can resolve this issue. Also, we’re moving forward with our plans to require User-Agent strings that properly identify applications using our service to fix this problem going forward.
If you are the author of said application, please leave a comment with information on how we can get in touch with you.
In an effort to mitigate/fix MBS-3379 we need to restart the service that keeps the session information for our release editors. We’re going to do that tomorrow Saturday October 28 at Noon PDT, 3PM EDT, 8PM London, 9PM Amsterdam. If at this time you have a release editor open, submitting your edits will fail and you will need to start your edits over again.
Sorry for the inconvenience.
The MusicBrainz community has two very active contributors (navap and reosarevok) who do not have and cannot afford to buy decent development machines/laptops. MusicBrainz is carefully watching its finances currently and can’t really afford to spend money on this right now, so I’m curious to see if the community would come together to support these two awesome contributors.
Navap has done a lot of editing and web site improvements (a series of 8 or so nitpick patches that greatly improved the look/feel of NGS) and countless other tasks to improve MusicBrainz. Reosarevok is a very active editor and has recently become our wiki god; he is also wishing to help out more with the development. Both of these two awesome contributors could be more productive with decent machines.
We’re looking to buy two $500 Linux capable machines that have a couple of cores and about 4GB of RAM each. Would you please consider chipping in to help our contributors? You can make a cash donation (please let us know your donation should go towards laptops) or even send a laptop to our contributors. If you’d like to help out with a donation of an actual machine, please leave a comment in the blog and I’ll get in touch with you.
Thanks!
I would like to remind Web Service users that on 16 November we’re going to block generic User-Agent strings from accessing our web service. Earlier we said:
The User-Agent string needs to identify the application and the version of the application that is making the request; having a generic User-Agent string like “Java/1.6.0_24″ or “PHP/5.3.4″ does not allow us to properly identify the application making the requests.
IMPORTANT: 6 Months after we release NGS (Nov 16th) we’re going to start blocking common generic User-Agents strings, so please make sure that you send us a proper User-Agent header as part of your request.
You have been warned. 🙂
The MusicBrainz summit is going to get started later today and we’re going to have a Google Hangout as our low-budget webcasting solution. You should friend musicbrainz.summit at gmail dot com in Google Plus and then join our Hangout to join in our conversation.
See you online later tonight!
UPDATE: We failed to get the hang out started today. We’ll start our hang-our tomorrow morning at 10am Rotterdam time.