Category: Hardware

MetaBrainz Summit 2022

The silliest, and thus best, group photo from the summit. Left to right: Aerozol, Monkey, Mayhem, Atj, lucifer (laptop), yvanzo, alastairp, Bitmap, Zas, akshaaatt

After a two-year break, in-person summits made their grand return in 2022! Contributors from all corners of the globe visited the Barcelona HQ to eat delicious local food, sample Monkey and alastairp’s beer, marvel at the architecture, try Mayhem’s cocktail robot, savour New Zealand and Irish chocolates, munch on delicious Indian snacks, and learn about the excellent Spanish culture of sleeping in. As well as, believe it or not, getting “work” done – recapping the last year, and planning, discussing, and getting excited about the future of MetaBrainz and its projects.

We also had some of the team join us via Stream; Freso (who also coordinated all the streaming and recording), reosarevok, lucifer, rdswift, and many others who popped in. Thank you for patiently waiting while we ranted and when we didn’t notice you had your hand up. lucifer – who wasn’t able to come in person because of bullshit Visa rejections – we will definitely see you next year!

A summary of the topics covered follows. The more intrepid historians among you can see full event details on the wiki page, read the minutes, look at the photo gallery, and watch the summit recordings on YouTube: Day 1, Day 2, Day 3

OAuth hack session

With everyone together, the days before the summit proper were used for some productive hack sessions. The largest of which, involving the whole team, was the planning and beginning of a single OAuth location – meaning that everyone will be sent to a single place to login, from all of our projects.

A great warmup for the summit, we also leapt forward on the project, from identifying how exactly it would work, to getting substantial amounts of code and frontend elements in place.

Project recaps

“I broke this many things this year”

To kick off the summit, after a heart-warming introduction by Mayhem, we were treated to the annual recap for each project. For the full experience, feast your eyeballs on the Day 1 summit video – or click the timestamps below. What follows is a eyeball-taster, some simplistic and soothing highlights.

State of MetaBrainz (Mayhem) (4:50)

  • Mayhem reminds the team that they’re kicking ass!
  • We’re witnessing people getting fed up with streaming and focusing on a more engaged music experience, which is exactly the type of audience we wish to cater to, so this may work out well for us.
  • In 2023 we want to expand our offerings to grow our supporters (ListenBrainz)
  • Currently staying lean to prepare for incoming inflation/recession/depression

State of ListenBrainz (lucifer) (57:10)

  • 18.4 thousand all time users
  • 595 million all time listens
  • 92.3 million new listens submitted this year (so far)
  • Stacks of updates in the last year
  • Spotify metadata cache has been a game changer

State of Infrastructure (Zas) (1:14:40)

  • We are running 47 servers, from 42 in 2019
  • 27 physical (Hetzner), 12 virtual (Hetzner), 8 active instances (Google)
  • 150 Terabytes served this year
  • 99.9% availability of core services
  • And lots of detailed server, Docker, and ansible updates, and all the speed and response time stats you can shake a stick at.

State of MusicBrainz (Bitmap) (1:37:50)

  • React conversion coming along nicely
  • Documentation improved (auto-generated schema diagrams)
  • SIR crashes fixed, schema changes, stacks of updates (genres!)
  • 1,600 active weekly editors (stable from previous years)
  • 3,401,467 releases in the database
  • 391,536 releases added since 2021, ~1,099 per day
  • 29% of releases were added by the top 25 editors
  • 51% of releases were added with some kind of importer
  • 12,607,881 genre tag votes
  • 49% of release groups have at least one genre
  • 300% increase in the ‘finnish tango’ genre (3, was 1 in 2021)

State of AcousticBrainz (alastairp) (21:01:07)

  • R.I.P. (for more on the shut down of AB, see the blog post)
  • 29,460,584 submissions
  • 1.2 million hits per day still (noting that the level of trust/accuracy of this information is very low)
  • Data dumps, with tidying of duplicates, will be released when the site goes away

State of CritiqueBrainz (alastairp) (2:17:05)

  • 10,462 total reviews
  • 443 reviews in 2022
  • Book review support!
  • General bug squashing

State of BookBrainz (Monkey) (2:55:00)

  • A graph with an arrow going up is shown, everyone applauds #business #stonks
  • Twice the amount of monthly new users compared to 2021
  • 1/7th of all editions were added in the last year
  • Small team delivering lots of updates – author credits, book ratings/reviews, unified addition form
  • Import plans for the future (e.g. Library of Congress)

State of Community (Freso) (3:25:00)

  • Continuing discussion and developments re. how MetaBrainz affects LGBTQIA2+ folks
  • New spammer and sockpuppet countermeasures
  • Room to improve moderation and reports, particularly cross-project

Again, for delicious technical details, and to hear lots of lovely contributors get thanked, watch the full recording.

Discussions

“How will we fix all the things alastairp broke”

Next (not counting sleep, great meals, and some sneaky sightseeing) we moved to open discussion of various topics. These topics were submitted by the team, topics or questions intended to guide our direction for the next year. Some of these topics were discussed in break-out groups. You can read the complete meeting minutes in the summit minutes doc.

Ratings

Ratings were added years ago, and remain prominent on MusicBrainz. The topic for discussion was: What is their future? Shall we keep them? This was one of the most popular debates at the summit, with input from the whole spectrum of rating lovers and haters. In the end it was decided to gather more input from the community before making any decisions. We invite you to regale us with tales of your useage, suggestions, and thoughts in the resulting forum thread. 5/5 discussion.

CritiqueBrainz

Similar to ratings, CritiqueBrainz has been around for a number of years now and hasn’t gained much traction. Another popular topic, with lots of discussion regarding how we could encourage community submissions, improvements that could be made, how we can integrate it more closely with the other projects. Our most prolific CB contributor, sound.and.vision, gave some invaluable feedback via the stream. Ultimately it was decided that we are happy to sunset CB as a website (without hurry), but retain its API and integrate it into our other projects. Bug fixes and maintenance will continue, but new feature development will take place in other projects.

Integrating Aerozol (design)

Aerozol (the author of this blog post, in the flesh) kicked us off by introducing himself with a little TED talk about his history and his design strengths and weaknesses. He expressed interest in being part of the ‘complete user journey’, and helping to pull MetaBrainz’ amazing work in front of the general public, while being quite polite about MeB’ current attempts in this regard. It was decided that Aerozol should focus on over-arching design roadmaps that can be used to guide project direction, and that it is the responsibility of the developers to make sure new features and updates have been reviewed by a designer (including fellow designer, Monkey).

MusicBrainz Nomenclature

Can MetaBrainz sometimes be overly-fond of technical language? To answer that, ask yourself this: Did we just use the word ’nomenclature’ instead of something simpler, like ‘words’ or ‘terms’, in this section title? Exactly. With ListenBrainz aiming for a more general audience, who expect ‘album’ instead of ‘release group’, and ‘track’ instead of ‘recording’, this was predicted to become even more of an issue. Although it was acknowledged that it’s messy and generally unsatisfying to use different terms for the same things within the same ‘MetaBrainz universe’, we decided that it was fine for ListenBrainz to use more casual language for its user-facing bits, while retaining the technical language behind the scenes/in the API.

A related issue was also discussed, regarding how we title and discuss groupings of MusicBrainz entities, which is currently inconsistent, such as “core entities”, “primary entities”, “basic entities”. No disagreements with yvanzo’s suggestions were raised, the details of which can be found in ticket MBS-12552.

ListenBrainz Roadmap

Another fun discussion (5/5 – who said ratings weren’t useful!), it was decided that for 2023 we should prioritize features that bring in new users. Suggestions revolved around integrating more features into ListenBrainz directly (for instance, integrating MusicBrainz artist and album details, CritiqueBrainz reviews and ratings), how to promote sharing (please, share your thoughts and ideas in the resulting forum thread), making landing pages more inviting for new users, and how to handle notifications.

From Project Dev to Infrastructure Maintenance

MetaBrainz shares a common ‘tech org’ problem, stemming from working in niche areas which require high levels of expertise. We have many tasks that only one or a few people know how to do. It was agreed we should have another doc sprint, which was scheduled for the third week of January (16th-20th).

Security Management / Best Practices

Possible password and identity management solutions were discussed, and how we do, and should, deal with security advisories and alerts. It was agreed that there would be a communal security review the first week of each month. There is a note that “someone” should remember to add this to the meeting agenda at the right time. Let’s see how that pans out.

Search & SOLR

Did you know that running and calibrating search engines is a difficult Artform? Indeed, a capital a Artform. Our search team discussed a future move from SOLR v7 to SOLR v9 (SOLR is MusicBrainz’ search engine). It was discussed how we could use BookBrainz as a guinea pig by moving it from ElasticSearch (the search engine BB currently runs on) to SOLR, and try finally tackle multi-entity search while we are at it. If you really like reading about ‘cores’, ‘instances’, and whatever ‘zookeeper’ is, then these are your kind of meeting minutes.

Weblate

We currently use Transifex to translate MusicBrainz to other languages (Sound interesting? Join the community translation effort!), but are planning to move to Weblate, an open-source alternative that we can self-host. Pros and cons were discussed, and it seems that Weblate can provide a number of advantages, including discussion of translation strings, and ease of implementation across all our projects. Adjusting it to allow for single-sign on will involve some work. Video tutorials and introducing the new tool to the community was put on the to-do list.

Listenbrainz Roadmap and UI/UX

When a new user comes to ListenBrainz, where are they coming from, what do they see, where are we encouraging them to click next? Can users share and invite their friends? Items discussed were specific UI improvements, how we can implement ‘calls to action’, and better sharing tools (please contribute to the community thread if you have ideas). It was acknowledged that we sometimes struggle at implementing sharing tools because the team is (largely) not made up of social media users, and that we should allow for direct sharing as well as downloading and then sharing. Spotify, Apple Music, and Last.FM users were identified as groups that we should or could focus on.

Messages and Notifications

We agreed that we should have a way of notifying users across our sites, for site-user as well as user-user interactions. There should be an ‘inbox-like’ centre for these, and adequate granular control over the notification options (send me emails, digests, no emails, etc.), and the notification UI should show notifications from all MeB projects, on every site. We discussed how a messaging system could hinder or help our anti-spam efforts, giving users a new conduit to message each other, but also giving us possible control (as opposed to the current ‘invisible’ method of letting users direct email each other). It was decided to leave messaging for now (if at all), and focus on notifications.

Year in Music

We discussed what we liked (saveable images, playlists) and what we thought could be improved (lists, design, sharing, streamlining), about last years Year in Music. We decided that this year each component needs to have a link so that it can be embedded, as well as sharing tools. We decided to publish our Year in Music in the new year, with the tentative date of Wednesday January 4th, and let Spotify go to heck with their ’not really a year yet’ December release. We decided to use their December date to put up a blog post and remind people to get their listens added or imported in time for the real YIM!

Mobile Apps

The mobile app has been making great progress, with a number of substantial updates over the last year. However it seems to be suffering an identity crisis, with people expecting it to be a tagger on the level of Picard (or not really knowing what they expect), and then leaving bad reviews. After a lot of discussion (another popular and polarising topic!) it was agreed to make a new slimmed-down ListenBrainz app to cater to the ListenBrainz audience, and leave the troubled MusicBrainz app history behind. An iOS app isn’t out of the question, but something to be left for the future. akshaaatt has beaten me to the punch with his blog post on this topic.

MusicBrainz UI/UX Roadmap

The MusicBrainz dev and design team got together to discuss how they could integrate design and a broader roadmap into the workflow. It was agreed that designers would work in Figma (a online layout/mockup design tool), and developers should decide case-by-case whether an element should be standalone or shared among sites (using the design system). We will use React-Bootstrap for shared components. As the conversion to React continues it may also be useful to pull in designers to look at UI improvements as we go. It was agreed to hold regular team meetings to make sure the roadmap gets and stays on track and to get the redesign (!) rolling.

Thank you

Revealed! Left to right: Aerozol, Monkey, Mayhem, Atj, lucifer (laptop), yvanzo, alastairp, Bitmap, Zas, akshaaatt

On behalf of everyone who attended, a huge thanks to the wonderful denizens of Barcelona and OfficeBrainz for making us all feel so welcome, and MetaBrainz for making this trip possible. See you next year!

Google donates $10,000 in cloud computing credits. Thank you!

The Google Open Source Programs Office continues to support MetaBrainz in a number of ways and most recently they donated $10,000 in credit toward their cloud services. Thank you Google!

This credit allows us to run some services in the cloud to round out primary hosting setup — this gives us a some redundancy and allows us to not keep all of our critical eggs in one basket. We can also give our open source developers Virtual Machines from time to time, since a lot of our projects are very data heavy. Having access to a fat VM can sometimes turn a really frustrating project that makes your laptop melt into a project that is satisfying to watch chug along.

Thank you again, Google, the Open Source Programs Office and in particular, Cat Allman!

Final sprint towards NewHost

So tomorrow is the day when the old servers at Digital West will be put to rest. Our developers and system administrator have been hard at work over the last few weeks (and especially the last few days!) getting everything ready for a hopefully smooth transition to hosting everything at Hetzner in Germany.

The vast majority of our sites and services are in fact already being served from Germany, but the largest one—musicbrainz.org—remains in the US for another night.

Our transition of the final services, such as musicbrainz.org, has already started, but the very last sprint of moving the remaining bits over will start tomorrow, November 8th, at around 6 AM EST / noon UTC / 13:00 CET and will follow the plan laid out in this Google document:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1MgqZ4hiKC0MZJ400ZCOD8JlcjBjh4GNpakauf51YKQQ/edit?usp=sharing

Expect some downtime, plenty of read-only time, and general wonkiness as we get the last gears set in place to hopefully keep us running smoothly for the next several years to come!

Massive connectivity issues

As you are probably aware, we’ve been having lots of network connectivity issues with all services hosted at Digital West in California (all of our projects, except ListenBrainz and AcousticBrainz).

Today we spent all morning trying to replace what we thought to be a faulty switch. That process didn’t go very well at all – we hit every conceivable issue that we could’ve hit. And a few more.

But, in this process we connected our gateway machines directly to our uplink (not through our switch) and the network issues persisted! After testing this setup with both of our machines, we’ve now conclusively eliminated all of our equipment as the possible source of trouble.

At this point our troubles lie in the hands of Digital West to fix. Thankfully the day staff will return to work in a few hours and hopefully we will make some progress on this issue then.

Sorry for all of this hassle. 😦

State of the Onion: MetaBrainz

In the past few weeks we’ve been hit with several traffic increases to MusicBrainz which is putting considerably more strain on our aging infrastructure than we’re happy with. If it seems that we’re not doing anything about it, that is because we’ve been busy behind the scenes trying to keep things moving forward. This sometimes doesn’t leave us a lot of time to keep the public informed on our work. Hopefully this blog post will fix this in the short term:

In 2011 we started to make plans to move MusicBrainz hosting into the cloud, but then out of the blue we were donated a pile of machines. There were so many machines that I postponed the cloud plans and prepared the donated machines for service. That has carried us for 4+ years with almost no hardware cost, which was really great. The plan was to move to the cloud sometime around 2015, but then I spent most of 2014/2015 dealing with conflicts in the team, putting us seriously behind schedule while our hardware decayed.

On top of that, we’ve recently had some “bad luck”. We have had some disrespectful commercial customers hit us really hard and we had to find and block them. We have had unexpected traffic spikes and when trying to address these unexpected traffic spikes, we had two more machines fail on us. These were the donated machines that we kept in reserve for just this moment. The loss of two machines caught us short on capacity to handle the increased demands on our servers.

So, now we face the tough question: Do we buy expensive hardware that we might use for 6 months (~$5000) or do we try and save the money and tough it out? I’d rather not spend so much money on such short term use if we can avoid it. We’re going to try and move to a new hosting facility somewhere in the EU, since that is where most of our users are.

Moving to a new hosting facility has an incredible number of dependencies that Christina (our Biz Dev manager), Zas and I have been working through. It may not seem like we have a plan, but we do, and we’re incredibly busy trying to make the plan happen. To give you a taste of what we’re up against:

  1. We want to move our hosting to Europe and have a business presence in Europe in order to reduce the costs and inefficiencies of being a solely US based business. A lot of our traffic, customers and contractors are in the EU and it simply makes sense to have a presence here.
  2. To establish a presence in the EU I needed local help to help with the business matters as well as researching and establishing an EU organization. So I needed to find a Biz Dev manager and that person is Christina.
  3. Once Christina was on board she researched our options about what was suited for us. Getting that process moving involved getting certified documents from California, board approval for spending funds to establish the organization, EU labor law research, (and we needed to swap a board member, too!), hiring help to establish the org. and generally navigating the Spanish bureaucracy. (See this only slightly exaggerated short film for some clues of our ordeal.)
  4. Once the org. had been established we needed to convince the bank to open a bank account for us. The draconian US banking laws extend worldwide and the local bank had to ensure that they were not opening themselves up to thousands of $$$ in accounting hassles just to allow a tiny non-profit to open a bank account. We finally have a bank account and have started paying our contractors with it!
  5. At the same time we’re also working to set up an office for the growing team here in Barcelona. That required a byzantine process that barely started when you sign the lease. Getting power, internet and water set up has taken a frustratingly long time. Had I known how long, I would have stayed at my co-working space for a while longer while addressing hosting issues.
  6. While Christina has been focused on the hardcore paperwork, Zas is keeping the site running, which itself requires many heroics. Zas and I have started planning the move to the EU hosting provider. We’ve got a 5-page document that collects some of the open questions and requirements around this process: https://docs.google.com/document/d/16KNm4KksNwz29Opk1aILOMtCmPIeXFuxxUjMoPT3th0/edit#heading=h.dpfvoz1idcro. Right now Zas and Bitmap are here in Barcelona and we’re going to work on establishing a formal plan for moving to the new hosting company. We’re currently comparing hosting company offerings – see what we’ve collected so far if you care to follow along. The amount of work required to make this happen is making my head hurt. (A special shoutout to KodeStar, lead developer of FanArt.tv, for providing a lot of useful feedback about our various options.)
  7. While Christina, Zas and I have our hands full, Bitmap and Gentlecat continue to release new features and work on the schema change. Not to mention all the contributions from Freso and Reosarevok to keep the community happy and polite while we deal with less than optimal site conditions. That said, I am really happy and proud of my team, trying to keep things running in sub-optimal conditions.

This is just a snapshot of everything that is happening behind the scenes that will culminate with the goal of moving to a new hosting company and being set up in the EU. And mind you, we’re doing this with a minuscule budget trying to be careful of how we spent our money.

Postgres troubles resolved

I am glad to report that our problems are fixed and that our server is back to humming along nicely. The following is posted here so that if some other souls find themselves in our situation that they may learn form our experience:

What we changed:

  1. It was pointed out that max_connections of 500 was in fact insanely high, especially in light of using PGbouncer. Before we used PGbouncer we needed a lot more connections and when we started using PGbouncer, we never reduced this number.
  2. Our server_lifetime was set far too high (1 hour). Josh Berkus suggested lowering that to 5 minutes.
  3. We reduced the number of PGbouncer active connections to the DB.

What we learned:

  1. We had too many backends
  2. The backends were being kept around for too long by PGbouncer.
  3. This caused too many idle backends to kick around. Once we exhausted physical ram, we started swapping.
  4. Linux 3.2 apparently has some less than desirable swap behaviours. Once we started swapping, everything went nuts.

Going forward we’re going to upgrade our kernel the next time we have down time for our site and the rest should be sorted now.

Finally a word about Postgres itself:

Postgres rocks our world. I’m immensely pleased that once again the problems were our own stupidity and not Postgres’ fault. In over 10 years of using Postgres, problems with our site have never been Postgres’ fault. Not once.

Thanks to everyone who helped us through this tough time!

Postgres troubles

(Regular readers of this blog, please ignore this post. We’re casting a wide net to try and find help for our problems.)

UPDATE: This problem has been resolved and all of our services are returning to their normally dubious service levels. For a technical explanation of what went wrong, see here.

Dear Postgres gurus:

We at MusicBrainz have been very happy postgres users for over a decade now and Postgres is something that gives is very few headaches compared to all the other things that we run. But last week we started having some really vexing issues with our server. Here is some back-story:

http://blog.musicbrainz.org/2015/03/14/hosting-issues-downtime-tonight/

When our load spiked, we did the normal set of things that you do:

  • Check for missing indexes, made some new ones, no change. (see details below)
  • Examined for new traffic; none of our web front end servers showed an increase in traffic.
  • Eliminated non-mission-critical uses of the DB server: stop building indexes for search, turn off lower priority sites. No change.
  • Review the performance settings of the server. Debate each setting as a team and tune. shared_buffers and work_mem tuning has made the server more resilient to recover from spikes, but still, we get massive periodic spikes.

From a restart, everything is happy and working well. Postgres will use all available ram for a while, but stay out of swap, exactly what we want it to do. But then, it tips the scales and digs into swap and everything goes to hell. We’ve studied this post for quite some time and ran queries to understand how Posgres manages its ram:

http://www.depesz.com/2012/06/09/how-much-ram-is-postgresql-using/

And sure enough ram usage just keeps increasing and once we go beyond physical ram, it goes into swap. Not rocket science. We’ve noticed that our back ends keep growing in size. According to top, once we start having processes that are 10+% of ram, we’re nearly on the cusp of entering swap. It happens predictably time and time again. Selective use of pg_terminate_backend() of these large back ends can keep us out of swap. A new, smaller backend gets created, RAM usage goes down. However, this is hardly a viable solution.

We’re now on Postgres 9.1.15, and we have a lot of downstream users who also need to upgrade when we do, so this is something that we need to coordinate months in advance. Going to 9.4 is out in the short term. 😦 Ideally we can figure out what might be going wrong so we can fix it post-haste. MusicBrainz has been barely usable for the past few days. 😦

One final thought: We have an several tables from a previous version of the DB sitting in the public schema not being used at all. We keep meaning to drop those tables, but haven’t gotten around to it yet. They tables are not being used at all, so we assume that they should not impact the performance of Postgres. Might this be a problem?

So, any tips or words of advice you have for us, would be deeply appreciated. And now for way too much information about our setup:

Postgres:

9.1.15 (from ubuntu packages)

Host:

  • Linux totoro 3.2.0-57-generic #87-Ubuntu SMP Tue Nov 12 21:35:10 UTC 2013 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
  • 48GB ram
  • Raid 1,0 disks
  • PgBouncer in use.
  • Running postgres is its only task

postgresql.conf:

archive_command = '/bin/true'
archive_mode = 'on'
autovacuum = 'on'
checkpoint_segments = '128'
datestyle = 'iso, mdy'
default_statistics_target = '300'
default_text_search_config = 'pg_catalog.english'
data_directory = '/home/postgres/postgres9'
effective_cache_size = '30GB'
hot_standby = 'on'
lc_messages = 'en_US.UTF-8'
lc_monetary = 'en_US.UTF-8'
lc_numeric = 'en_US.UTF-8'
lc_time = 'en_US.UTF-8'
listen_addresses = '*'
log_destination = 'syslog'
log_line_prefix = '<%r %a %p>'
log_lock_waits = 'on'
log_min_duration_statement = '1000'
maintenance_work_mem = '64MB'
max_connections = '500'
max_prepared_transactions = '25'
max_wal_senders = '3'
custom_variable_classes = 'pg_stat_statements'
pg_stat_statements.max = '1000'
pg_stat_statements.save = 'off'
pg_stat_statements.track = 'top'
pg_stat_statements.track_utility = 'off'
shared_preload_libraries = 'pg_stat_statements,pg_amqp'
shared_buffers = '12GB'
silent_mode = 'on'
temp_buffers = '8MB'
track_activities = 'on'
track_counts = 'on'
wal_buffers = '16MB'
wal_keep_segments = '128'
wal_level = 'hot_standby'
wal_sync_method = 'fdatasync'
work_mem = '64MB'

pgbouncer.ini:

[databases]
musicbrainz_db_20110516 = host=127.0.0.1 dbname=musicbrainz_db_20110516

[pgbouncer]
pidfile=/home/postgres/postgres9/pgbouncer.pid
listen_addr=*
listen_port=6899
user=postgres
auth_file=/etc/pgbouncer/userlist.txt
auth_type=trust
pool_mode=session
min_pool_size=10
default_pool_size=320
reserve_pool_size=10
reserve_pool_timeout=1.0
idle_transaction_timeout=0
max_client_conn=400
log_connections=0
log_disconnections=0
stats_period=3600
stats_users=postgres
admin_users=musicbrainz_user

Monitoring:

To see these, enter these anti-spam passwords: User: “musicbrainz” passwd: “musicbrainz”

Load: http://stats.musicbrainz.org/mrtg/drraw/drraw.cgi?Mode=view;Template=1196205794.8081;Base=%2Fvar%2Fwww%2Fmrtg%2F%2Ftotoro_load.rrd

Disk IO: http://stats.musicbrainz.org/mrtg/drraw/drraw.cgi?Mode=view;Template=1196376086.1393;Base=%2Fvar%2Fwww%2Fmrtg%2F%2Ftotoro_diskstats-sda-count.rrd

RAM Use: http://stats.musicbrainz.org/mrtg/drraw/drraw.cgi?Mode=view;Template=1196204920.6439;Base=%2Fvar%2Fwww%2Fmrtg%2F%2Ftotoro_disk-physicalmemory.rrd

Swap use: http://stats.musicbrainz.org/mrtg/drraw/drraw.cgi?Mode=view;Template=1196204920.6439;Base=%2Fvar%2Fwww%2Fmrtg%2F%2Ftotoro_disk-swapspace.rrd

Processes: http://stats.musicbrainz.org/mrtg/drraw/drraw.cgi?Mode=view;Template=1196376477.1968;Base=%2Fvar%2Fwww%2Fmrtg%2F%2Ftotoro_processes.rrd

Indexes:

We ran the query from this suggestion to identify possible missing indexes:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3318727/postgresql-index-usage-analysis

this is our result:

https://gist.github.com/mayhem/423b084043235fb78642

Most of these tables are tiny and kept in ram. Postgres opts to not use any indexes we create on the DB, so no change.

UPDATES:

  • Five months ago we double the RAM from 24GB to 48GB, but our traffic has not increased.
  • We’ve set kernel.swapiness to 0 with no real change.
  • free -m:
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:         48295      31673      16622          0          5      12670
-/+ buffers/cache:      18997      29298
Swap:        22852       2382      20470

OT: Toshiba USA service sucks. Don't buy their products!

Sorry for the off-topic post, but I feel that I need to speak up about the atrocious customer service I’ve gotten from Toshiba.

About a year ago we purchased three new portable hard drives that we use for backing up the MusicBrainz servers. These are used for off-site back-ups; every monday when I am in town, I pedal to Digital West and swap out the back-up disk. Should a bomb hit Digital West, we have an off-site backup that we can use to restore MusicBrainz. After about 3 months, the first drive failed and I promptly attempted to return the drive, but the site where you request an RMA number refused to recognize the drives as valid products that Toshiba supports. I periodically checked back to see if they would finally give me an RMA number. About 3 months ago, the system did give me an RMA number and I sent the drives in. 2 weeks later nothing had happened, no replacement drive appeared.

I called Toshiba and no one knew where my drive was. Finally I got an email saying that I had sent the drive to a place that was no longer accepting the drives and my drive was going to be returned to me. What? I filled out the forms and use their mailing label to send the package, how could this go wrong? I called them back asking to ”’not”’ return the drive, but to actually forward it to the RMA place. Of course, no one could actually tell me what was going on. Three days later of being escalated and talking to clueless idiots, I finally got someone who had a clue about what was going on. But that person was wholly unwilling to make an effort to make things right. My drive was sent back to me, but the address was written unclearly and it took an extra 2 weeks for UPS to actually get the drive back to me. (This person also said I should cut Toshiba USA some slack since they were a tiny organization. Ha! They have no idea what tiny really means!)

I finally have my broken drive back and I’m out many hours of time and $12 in shipping costs. And this week the second drive died and I have no patience for dealing with Toshiba again. I am going to recycle all of these drives and replace them with new drives and be done with this. I want nothing to do with Toshiba again. Thanks Toshiba, we’re out $300 — you suck.

This post serves as a public notice that Toshiba sucks and that you should not purchase anything from them, since they refuse to properly support their products.