Most searches performed on MusicBrainz just use the first page of results. However, users are allowed to request additional pages.

Problems arise when distant pages are requested, because it invalidates parts of the internal cache, resulting in slower responses, if not stalling responses. The instability of the cache is currently a major concern for the back-end Solr cluster in production.

There is no good reason to request very distant results. It is mainly due to bad actors using it to browse the database in a dumb way.

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The limit should be fully configurable. By default, it should be set in production and unset (for unlimited results) in mirrors.

The proposed implementation is to limit the number of reachable results in MusicBrainz Server as such limit cannot be set in the Solr configuration. The total number of results will still be shown, even though not all of those will be reachable. If unreachable results are requests, an error will be graciously returned.

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Given the attached statistics, a limit of 500 results per search would have captured 99.57% of the requests received by the Solr back-end yesterday.

It seems to be a reasonable limit at first glance, but comments are welcome if any legitimate use cases would be missing additional results.