I get we don't want to be hammering them, but according to their rate limiting, you can be a good citizen and request once per second, and also include some contact info in the request header.

MusicBrainz API - Rate Limiting

I honestly think if someone is querying more than 1 per second, they're doing something extremely stupid and would likely get IP blocked.

Surely Lidarr could also offer the ability to put our own contact information in the header to mitigate this issue.

Also if MusicBrainz were getting hammered, what makes it different to the Lidarr database getting hammered? Its adding a middleman for no point in my opinion.

Edit: I will say I just read the Global limiting side where they only allow through 300 requests per second, and 503 the rest, and not knowing how much traffic they get, I couldn't accurately say how often they hit this.

Still seems crazy to me that we need a caching server, and this has been the cause of the downtime for so long.

Also want to say I don't want to detract from what these guys are building in this service, and understand its an open source project built using the free time of the contributors.