Category: Server

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:

• http://test.musicbrainz.org
• http://de.musicbrainz.org
• http://nl.musicbrainz.org

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!

Technorati Tags: colo, service

Halsey Minor with Minor Ventures and David Ulevitch of Freedom Networks just donated two Dell Poweredge 1750 servers to the MetaBrainz Foundation! Each of these two 1U servers clocks in with:

• Dual 2.8 Ghz Xeon processors
• 2 Gb RAM
• 2 Ultra 320 36Gb SCSI drives with RAID controller

These two machines help us quite a way toward our current hardware fundraising goal — now we only need to find a beefy database server and we’re ready to migrate into the colocation facility here in SLO.

Thank you so much Halsey and David — the entire MusicBrainz community will love you for your generous donation!

Technorati Tags: hardware, hosting, metabrainz

I recently got word that at least one for-profit company (who shall remain nameless right now) is/was using the MusicBrainz web service in their paid commercial offering. Personally, I don’t think its OK for a for-profit company to be consuming the resources of a non-profit — we make all of our data and software available for companies to download and use for free (as in speech and beer). If someone wants to use our data for their product, they should do it with their own resources.

For the first set version of the Terms of Service, I would like to keep things simple and not add too many rules. Given that I would like to solicit feedback about adopting the following Terms of Service for the web service:

• The data returned by the web service is covered under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License.
• Applications that make their source code available under an OSI approved open source license are considered non-commercial.
• Applications that charge a registration or shareware fee and that donate at least 10% of their fees to the MetaBrainz Foundation are considered non-commercial. (e.g. Jaikoz and Magic-Tagger)

I’d like to get some feedback on this, so please leave a comment:

• Does this make sense philosophically?
• Do you spot any problems with this setup?
• What else should we consider?

Technorati Tags: musicbrainz, web service