Tag: update

Reminder: Upgrading to PostgreSQL 12 on May 18, 2020

As we announced in February, in two weeks time (May 18, 2020) we’ll be upgrading our production database server to PostgreSQL v12 (from v9.5). At the same time, v12 will become the minimum supported version for MusicBrainz Server, so we ask that you upgrade afterwards as soon as possible! If you’re still unsure, a Q&A is below.

When do I need to upgrade my postgres by?

As soon as possible after May 18 if you’d like to keep your musicbrainz-server code up to date.

How do I perform the upgrade?

We’ll provide instructions closer to May 18. It’s recommended that you don’t upgrade until then, since we’ll be providing scripts to resolve some issues.

Will the live data feed (replication packets) stop working right away if I don’t upgrade?

No, as long as you keep your musicbrainz-server code checkout on the v-2020-05-11 tag (which will be the final release before May 18) or earlier. Future releases may work for a while too.

This is not a schema change release, so replication will continue to work smoothly until you upgrade. No tables or views will change.

However, to make the upgrade process smoother we’ll be dropping the musicbrainz-collate and musicbrainz-unaccent extensions, instead using PG’s builtin collation support for the former and replacing the latter with the unaccent extension from postgresql-contrib. A few SQL functions are being added to enable this, and some indexes need to be rebuilt. This will all happen as part of upgrade scripts we provide (or you can import from scratch). Some features of musicbrainz-server that use these old extensions may cease to work if you don’t apply them.

The extension changes above don’t actually make use of any new PG 12 features. We’ll avoid using such features for at least 1 month.

If I’m already running PostgreSQL 12, do I need to do anything?

Yes, but things will be easier for you. As mentioned in the previous answer, we’ll be dropping the musicbrainz-collate and musicbrainz-unaccent extensions to make the upgrade process smoother for pre-v12 instances. So you’ll only have to run some upgrade scripts we provide to replace those extensions and rebuild some indexes.

My host/distribution doesn’t have PostgreSQL 12 yet!

If you’re running Debian or Ubuntu, the PGDG maintains an APT repository with the latest versions. These are the same packages MetaBrainz uses in production.

Amazon RDS supports PostgreSQL 12 since March 31.

I absolutely cannot upgrade yet! What should I do?

You can stay on the v-2020-05-11 release of musicbrainz-server or earlier until then. Replication packets (i.e. the live data feed) will continue to work until the next schema change on that tag, but you’ll have upgraded to v12 by then, right?

Instead of performing a pg_upgrade and running these upgrade scripts you mentioned, can I just import fresh data dumps into a new v12 cluster?

Of course. Just make sure your musicbrainz-server git checkout is on the v-2020-05-18 tag (once that’s released) or later before performing the import. And keep in mind it may be slower than a direct upgrade.

Upgrading Postgres instead of schema change: 18 May, 2020

Hello!

We’ve long procrastinated upgrading our production Postgres installation and we’ve decided to forego a schema change upgrade and instead upgrade Postgres to version 12.x. (We will migrate to whatever the latest stable version in the 12.x series will be).

This means that on 18 May we will not make any changes to the MusicBrainz schema, but  we will have some amount of down-time and/or read-only time while we upgrade Postgres on our production servers. We haven’t sorted out all of the exact details of how we will carry out this database upgrade, but the date is now confirmed.

If you operate a replicated instance of the MusicBrainz database we STRONGLY urge you to upgrade your installation shortly after we upgrade the production servers. After this release our team may start using Postgres features not available in Postgres 9.5.x, which is our current production version.

As usual for our releases that impact our downstream users, we will post many more details closer to the date and once the migration is complete, we will post detailed instructions on how you can upgrade your own installation.

Please post any questions you may have!

Thanks!

Picard 2.0 released

Hey people, samj1912 here again o/

This time we are announcing the release of a new Picard!

Official MusicBrainz cross-platform music tagger Picard 2.0 is now out, containing many fixes and new features and much needed upgrades!

The last time we put out a major release was more than 6 years ago (Picard 1.0 in June of 2012), so this release comes with a major back-end update. If you’re in a hurry and just want to try it out, the downloads are available from the Picard website.

If you have been following our Picard related blogs, you will know that we switched up our dependencies a bit. Python should now be at least version 3.5, PyQt 5.7 or newer and Mutagen should be 1.37 or newer. A side effect of this dependency bump is that Picard should look better and in general feel more responsive.

A couple of things to note – with Picard 2.0, Picard Windows builds will be portable standalone binaries. Also, we will only be supporting 64-bit Windows officially because of lack of resources to build a 32-bit image. The macOS requirements were also bumped up for the same reasons, with macOS 10.10 being the lowest version that is supported.

As such, Picard 1.4.2 will be the last version that is supported for both Windows 32 and macOS 10.7-10.10. You can find it in the Picard downloads section as well.

You can find a detailed change-log on the Picard webiste.

The highlights of this update are –

  • Retina and Hi-DPI display support
  • Improved performance
  • UI improvements

We would like to thank all contributors, from all around the world, who helped for this release: Laurent Monin, Sophist, Wieland Hoffmann, Vishal Choudhary, Philipp Wolfer, Calvin Walton, David Mandelberg, Paul Roub, Yagyansh Bhatia, Shen-Ta Hsieh, Ville Skyttä, Yvan Rivierre and also all of our translators!

Be aware that downgrading from 2.0 to 1.4 may lead to configuration compatibility issues – ensure that you have saved your Picard configuration before using 2.0 if you intend to go back to 1.4.

Note:  If you are facing errors while tagging releases on Windows, do take a look at this FAQ about SSL errors.

Updated search jar/war files

Given the utter slackers we are, we haven’t yet finished updating the search server to output the new MBIDs that were added to some entities in our last release. We’ll try and get that done soonish.

However, we did update the search code to fix this error in the search indexer:

ERROR: type “earth” does not exist

I’ve put both of these jar/war files on our FTP site:

If you would like to try and build these from source, you’ll need commit 4f677727 from mmd-schema and the latest master commit from search-server. For instructions on how to build this, please follow these instructions.

UPDATE: The build from the current master for search-server appears to not be able to load indexes upon startup. Please use the old war (we still use this in production) until we can release a fix.

Server capacity update

Zas and I have been working hard to improve the capacity and stability of the site. In the last week, we’ve identified and fixed at least 3 problems with the search servers and we’ve added a timeout function that times out queries that take longer than 3 seconds. We think that the main cause of trouble was that queries were piling up after a slow query ran too long and that the servers never recovered from that and consequently crashed.

We won’t go as far as saying that the search servers are fixed — every time we have a smidgen of hope that things are improving, they crash again. Seemingly out of spite! So, the search servers are better. 😉

Zas has also made a number of changes to the gateways and how we rate limit our incoming traffic. The rate limiting is now being done in a smarter way that reduces the overall traffic on our web servers. Well done!

We’ve also increased our bandwidth budget by 4mbits per second, which makes the site feel considerably more responsive.

Let me put these improvement into numbers: About a week ago were were struggling to keep up 250 requests per second and the site felt very sluggish. Now we can handle 500 requests a second and the site feels considerably faster. For large chunks of the day we are managing to handle all the traffic we should handle. And, the search servers haven’t crashed in 4 days!

We hope that this will give us a solid base from which to release the scheme upgrade tomorrow. Then once that is complete, we will start work on moving to the new hosting company.

Thanks for being patient with us!

Upgrading Postgres for MusicBrainz Live Data Feed users

We’re slowly approaching that time of year: Schema change release time. After skipping our fall update to focus on some internal tasks, we’re ready to have another schema change release in the spring: May 16, 2016

We have started the process to collect features we wish to release for this schema change release and we’ll be publishing that list in the coming weeks. However, we’re contemplating the impact of one more change we’d like to make: Upgrading to a more recent version of Postgres.

Internally we are going upgrade to Postgres 9.5, which was recently released, so we expect that the Postgres team will have worked out the most significant kinks before we’re ready to move to it. However, even though we are moving to 9.5, we are considering the impact on our downstream users/customers who need to make the same or similar change.

While we are moving to version 9.5 of Postgres, we have the option of only adopting features from Postgres 9.4, which means that our downstream users may continue to use Postgres 9.4. However, Postgres 9.5 has some nice features we’d like to use (e.g. UPSERT), so we’re pondering if it is possible for us to require Postgres 9.5 from all of ours Live Data Feed users starting on May 16, 2016. 

We have already informally queried a few of ours users and so far it seems that requiring Postgres 9.5 is feasible. If you are a Live Data Feed user and feel that this requirement of Postgres 9.5 is too much for your and your organization by May 16, 2016, please leave a comment to this blog post!