MusicBrainz Blog

The traffic to MusicBrainz is growing steadily! (steady growth is much better than exponential growth!)

We’ve recently added two more search servers, which are now humming along nicely. But now we’re seeing that our main web server is starting to get saturated, so we need to add more capacity. In order to use our existing machines effectively and to greatly increase the redundancy of our site, we’ve asked out board of directors to approve the purchase of two more servers. I expect this to be approved shortly.

In the meantime we’re getting more serious about people who are violating our very liberal terms of service that state that no single client instance is to make more than one Web Service call to MusicBrainz per second. We’ve been blocking mis-behaving clients more aggressively and have decided to block all clients that use this User-Agent id string:

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; Win32; WinHttp.WinHttpRequest.5

If you’re using a MusicBrainz enabled application and all of the sudden it stopped working today, please leave us a comment below. We’d love to identify the offending application so we can contact the author of the application.

Also, the following IP address have been blocked from using MusicBrainz, either because of their client string or sending too many requests to MusicBrainz:

85.144.88.11, 69.181.45.228, 80.58.205.43, 205.209.78.232, 195.235.104.253, 85.240.173.204, 92.195.16.20, 89.241.123.24, 71.12.186.1, 204.17.31.126, 98.64.41.178, 77.188.36.140, 141.155.126.17, 217.225.157.236, 91.9.246.252, 66.91.250.27, 217.41.4.13, 83.76.160.150, 91.67.8.254, 88.191.58.11, 141.30.218.96, 88.88.124.26, 82.42.72.21, 91.9.230.72,
213.22.39.14, 86.0.180.87

In the last 16 hours, the following IPs have been over the limit:

If you find your IP address on this list, please make a donation to the MetaBrainz Foundation and we’ll consider unblocking you after you assure us that you will not be making more than 1 request per second.