Category: Server

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Continue reading “Search server update”

The search server is terminally overloaded (load average over 100, last I looked), and it was taking down the main web site with it. Therefore for now I’ve had to change mb_server to show a simple error message instead of running the search.

You may be better off using the old search page
for now.

Hopefully more news later.

Tomorrow at 2000UTC (1300 PDT, 1500 EDT, 2100BST, 2200MET) we’re going to finally rotate the new Sun server into active service. We’re expecting MusicBrainz to be unavailable for about 90 minutes while we dump the database from our old server and import it to the new server.

Sorry for the inconvenience this will cause.

We’ve got the new database server finally ready to roll, except for one thing: We don’t know how to monitor the hardware RAID array.

Under Linux we would use mpt-status, but this doesn’t work for Solaris. Does anyone know how to get Solaris to tell us about the state of the hardware RAID array? If one of the drives in the array goes away, we want to know about it as soon as possible.

Any tips would be greatly appreciated!

UPDATE: Our very own inhouseuk had the answer: raidctl — a utility that was installed all along!

Its been a rocky week in the MusicBrainz universe, that’s for sure!

About three weeks ago the load on our database server started rising — most likely due to the fact that after the April 1 release people went nutz adding labels to the database and vastly more AR links than before. The onslaught of this extra data pushed our database over an invisible threshold and things started getting shaky.

In order for a database to be running smoothly and efficiently it should mostly fit into RAM and not require the database server to fetch much data from disk continually. Once the threshold is hit where data needs to be continually fetched from disk, everything slows down drastically.

That’s basically what happened three weeks ago — the database outgrew the server we have for it. At first we thought that some feature from the April 1 release was bogging down the server, so we did some triaging with no luck. Finally we decided to throw out nearly 1 GB of useless Add TRM edit data, which shrunk the database size back down to a manageable level.

This, of course, is nothing more than a band aid. In a few weeks this problem will be back. Anticipating this moment for over a year now, I’ve been pushing for a large server donation. The Sun server donation was supposed to perfectly take care of that. But we were having serious issues with getting the database to run well on the Sun box. But, with help of some Sun engineers we’ve gotten past this problem and are now in the final stages of preparing the Sun server for production use.

But, in this middle of all this more disaster struck. Lingling, which was taking over for Stimpy as our primary web server, had a power supply fail early in the morning this past Sunday. Stimpy, with redundant power supplies, was sitting idle waiting to be put back into service after he got a new motherboard from Dell. With all the other problems we didn’t have the time to switch Stimpy back in for Lingling — we had scheduled that to happen about 12 hours after Lingling failed.

Lingling has a new powersupply arriving tomorrow. Moose, the Sun server, may go into service this weekend or early next week. Once we get these two tasks done, the site performance should be back to being zippy.

Until then, I apologize for the inconvenience!

All the usual tricks to massage our database server aren’t helping. 🙁

The problem appears to be the ever growing table of TRMs that the Classic Tagger uses. The table has gotten too big with dead TRMs and its really hard to remove all the dead TRMs. So, in order to get things back to a sane state, we’ve disabled TRM functionality and our database is now working fairly well again.

Classic Tagger users: While we figure out how to proceed, the tagger will stop working. The classic tagger will not recognize any tracks right now — we apologize for the inconvenience. At this point, please check out the Picard and PicardQT as alternatives!

Stay tuned for more details!

We need to dump the database and re-import it in order to get off this crazy load spike the database has been on. We will be down for about 90 minutes starting today (Friday) at 2000 UTC, 4pm EDT, 1pm PDT.

Sorry for the inconvenience and late notice!

UPDATE: The import/export is taking longer than we care for. We hope to be done soon. Sorry for the hassle.

The load on our database server has been growing over the last few days causing slow downs. Since our overall traffic is not going up right now, this suggests that our last update caused some performance issues.

In order to analyze our traffic, I will be doing some performance tuning and query logging to attempt to get to the bottom of this problem. To that affect, MusicBrainz will have a couple of short downtimes today as I tinker with our database server.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

This weekend we’ve seen a rise in tagger traffic to the MusicBrainz site. This extra traffic is causing load spikes that give us the dreaded 502 proxy error messages. Now that the release is done I can focus more time on getting our various hardware issues solved and bring a new database server online before the load spikes return next weekend.

What can you do? There are three concrete things:

1. Make a donation to help us cover our costs.
2. Stop tagging for today and spend some time with your friends and family for Easter. 🙂
3. If you must continue tagging, please use our UK mirror: http://www.uk.musicbrainz.org In the options dialog of your favorite tagging application, look for the tab that lets you set the server you’re using to tag. Enter www.uk.musicbrainz.org in that field and you should be good to go.

Sorry for the inconvenience, we’ll work on this as soon as possible!

After much work by Lukáš, Dave, Age (Prodoc) and myself, I’m pleased to announce that the main server has been updated! We now have support for DataQuality, Labels, improved cover art, track annotations and a whole host of bug reports. To see the detailed list of what things have been included in this release, please see our release milestone.

This release is significant in a number of ways:

1. The labels feature is our first major schema extension in quite some time.
2. Its our first schema change release in over a year!
3. Age Bosma (Prodoc) has submitted a number of patches that were included in this release. Its great to see another aspiring developer getting code included in the main server. Well done and thanks much, Age!

Huge thanks go to Lukáš, Dave, Age for working on this release. Thank you!