Please note that due to system maintenance, e-conomic will be unavailable from
 

10 pm CET on 1 April to 6 pm CET on 2 April

We will keep you updated here on the blog during the application downtime and will of course notify you as soon as the system is up and running again.

We apologise for any inconvenience related to this downtime.

Update 10.00 pm CET 1 April: The scheduled service disruption has now started and e-conomic is not available. We will keep you posted.

Update 12.00 am CET 2 April: The operation has so far taken longer than we expected. We still expect to be online again no later than 6 pm today (2 April), but part of the planned operation might need to be carried out at a later stage.

Update 4.15 pm CET 2 April: The planned maintenance has been completed earlier than announced and e-conomic is now available again. We did not complete all of the planned maintenance tasks and will schedule the rest of the work to a later date.

Thanks for your patience and sorry for any inconvenience related to this downtime.

Improving the underlying storages of our database environment

Due to a major database restructuring, e-conomic will be unavailable for shorter periods at nighttime over the next week. In addition, we are planning a longer downtime of up to 20 hours on 1-2 April (the Easter holidays Holy Thursday/Good Friday).

In our continuous effort to improve the overall performance of the e-conomic application, we will be initiating a major restructuring of data over the next week. In other words, we are moving customer data files to faster SAN volumes.

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Tuesday morning once again saw the e-conomic application crawling to a near-halt for a couple of hours. This was quickly identified as being due to a subtle issue with a recently-introduced feature, which was subsequently optimized, thus eliminating the immediate issue.

However, prior to this, we have had several similar slowdowns over the past couple of months. We have identified the more general culprit to be an underlying storage system for our database back-end. In very simple terms, the disk speeds cannot keep up with certain functionalities. However, remedying this isn’t simply a matter of ‘adding faster disks’ – there’s quite a lot of careful planning involved as well. Right now, several people at both e-conomic and our hosting partner are working on this.

At the same time, we are of course doing everything we can to reduce the effects of this problem in the immediate term. This involves a lot of old-fashioned code optimizing – which has already been applied to several functions. Additionally, some specific functionalities have been identified to use a disproportionate amount of resources compared to the share of customers using it. For these functionalities, we may impose restrictions requiring these customers to e.g. filter reports more narrowly. In more extreme cases, we may choose to completely disable access to certain ‘heavy’ functionality for a short while, as we work on optimizing it.

We will of course keep you updated on both immediate, short and longer-term improvements and solutions to this.