Tag: Server

AcousticBrainz downtime: Migrating hosting to our other servers

Today we’re going to migrate the AcousticBrainz service from its standalone server that we’ve rented in the past few years to our shared infrastructure at Hetzner. We’ve been prepping for this move for a few weeks now and the actual process to follow has been used before, so we don’t expect the downtime to be more than 1 hour.

We’re sorry for the downtime that will be coming — to keep up with what we’re doing, please follow our progress on Twitter. We hope to start the migration in the next hour or two from when this blog post goes up.

 

Important: Schema change delayed to May 23

With our ongoing hosting issues due to massive traffic increases and failing hardware we’ve been too distracted trying to manage those issues to finish all of the testing for the schema change release that was scheduled for today.

We deeply regret having to do this, but we’re going to delay the schema change release by a week. It is now scheduled for May 23, 2016. This week long delay will give us a chance to further tweak our server configuration (more on this in the next blog post) and to test the schema change release in much more detail.

We are, however, going to upgrade our database server to Postgres 9.5 either later today or tomorrow. During this upgrade we are going to employ a back-up database server and keep MusicBrainz running in read-only mode with a slightly reduced overall capacity (I’m sure everyone know what that means by now). This upgrade should have no other effects on our downstream data users.

We will give people plenty of notice before we start the postgres upgrade via our site banner and via our Twitter account (@musicbrainz).

Sorry for the continued drama affecting our services — we’re working hard to keep things together!

New MusicBrainz server virtual machine available

Time to check the weather forecast for hell, because it appears to have frozen over! We have finally released a new Virtual Machine that contains all of the MusicBrainz server software and fixed all of the currently outstanding bugs (for the VM).

The new VM now uses a 64-bit architecture and has 80GB of disk-space so it should be much easier to get along with. I tried to ship one VM that has the search indexes build in, but after 3 hours (and increasing time) of trying to export that VM I killed it. If someone has better luck exporting a VM after building search indexes, please let me know. Also, VirtualBox seems to have improved in stability on Mac OS, so we are not going to build a VMWare version of the VM at this time.

All the details for the new VM are on our Server Setup page.

Remember to get your Live Data Feed access token here if you plan to use the replication.

New search servers

I’m happy to say that we’ve now got extra search servers – a failover pair, in fact, so we’re no longer reliant on a single search server. In fact shortly we hope to bring a third server into the pool too. Not bad considering that, so far, we’ve only ever had one (or zero) search servers.

What this means for you is that searches should be faster. It also means that the future performance of the web site is now more assured than it was before – we’re in a substantially better position to handle extra traffic.

Most of the work was done by Robert Kaye; I only helped to polish off the edges 🙂