Borked track index

Recently our search server hit a magical 2GB limit on search index sizes and consequently we’ve got a corrupted track search index. We’re in the process of building a new one, but the process takes about 7.5 hours. So, we will not have track searches or taglookup functionality (for tracks) for the next 7-8 hours. … Continue reading “Borked track index”

Recently our search server hit a magical 2GB limit on search index sizes and consequently we’ve got a corrupted track search index. We’re in the process of building a new one, but the process takes about 7.5 hours. So, we will not have track searches or taglookup functionality (for tracks) for the next 7-8 hours. I anticipate having this fixed around 22:00 PDT (6:00UTC).

I apologize for the inconvenience.

(And, sorry no, the mirror server won’t help since that relies on the main search server server too)

Move to new server complete!

Our move to the shiny new Sun server is finally complete! I’m pleased to announce that the new server is largely bored with the traffic we’re throwing at it right now — which is exactly what I had hoped for. This gives us a lot of room to grow our database. Thanks again for the … Continue reading “Move to new server complete!”

Our move to the shiny new Sun server is finally complete! I’m pleased to announce that the new server is largely bored with the traffic we’re throwing at it right now — which is exactly what I had hoped for. This gives us a lot of room to grow our database.

Thanks again for the kind donation Sun Microsystems!!

Scheduled downtime: Tuesday, May 15th, 2000UTC

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.

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.

Solaris help!

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 … Continue reading “Solaris help!”

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!

New VMWare Player image available

Rod put together the WMWare player image of the MusicBrainz server for the April 1 release. If you’re interested in hacking on MusicBrainz server code, you should start here: Download the April 1 server image Read the install instructions VirtualMusicBrainzServer Thanks for putting together the VMWare image, Rod!

Rod put together the WMWare player image of the MusicBrainz server for the April 1 release. If you’re interested in hacking on MusicBrainz server code, you should start here:

  1. Download the April 1 server image
  2. Read the install instructions VirtualMusicBrainzServer

Thanks for putting together the VMWare image, Rod!

General site update

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 … Continue reading “General site update”

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!

Google steps up its support of MusicBrainz!

I’m pleased to announce that Google has just pledged $30,000 to the MetaBrainz Foundation! This doubles the amount that Google gave us last year and reinforces Google’s commitment to supporting MusicBrainz. Combined with Google’s Summer of Code Project, Google is supporting MusicBrainz to the tune of $45,000 for 2007! This donation will allow us to: … Continue reading “Google steps up its support of MusicBrainz!”

I’m pleased to announce that Google has just pledged $30,000 to the MetaBrainz Foundation! This doubles the amount that Google gave us last year and reinforces Google’s commitment to supporting MusicBrainz. Combined with Google’s Summer of Code Project, Google is supporting MusicBrainz to the tune of $45,000 for 2007!

This donation will allow us to:

  • Hold Summit 8 that will build on and review the work done in Summit 7 and lay out a concrete roadmap for implementing the Next Generation Schema. MetaBrainz will pay for key players to attend this upcoming summit.
  • Increase the salary for Robert Kaye to more competitive rate.
  • Hire a part time developer to work on MusicBrainz and drive the implementation of the Next Generation Schema.

Thank you very much Google! Thank you to Chris DiBona, Leslie Hawthorn and Tiffany Griffith at Google’s Open Source group.

Creative Commons license for MusicBrainz Wiki

Previously we had not set a license for text/data in our Wiki. In order to make things explicit dmppanda has added a new MusicBrainzWikiLicense page that explictly sets the license to be the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 license. This makes the content in our wiki consistent with the data in our database. If you have … Continue reading “Creative Commons license for MusicBrainz Wiki”

Previously we had not set a license for text/data in our Wiki. In order to make things explicit dmppanda has added a new MusicBrainzWikiLicense page that explictly sets the license to be the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 license. This makes the content in our wiki consistent with the data in our database.

If you have contributed to the Wiki and object to this license being set, please Contact Us and we will work out the conflict.

Classic Tagger degraded

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 … Continue reading “Classic Tagger degraded”

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!