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.

In our ongoing efforts to ensure all our customers the best possible experience with the e-conomic application – as well as our numerous integration solutions – we have frequently observed that some customers are sending excessive numbers of requests to the e-conomic API.

In addition to having a negative impact on the performance of these particular integrations, this may also affect the perceived performance of the e-conomic system for other users.

Therefore, effective as of tomorrow, Tuesday, 16 February, e-conomic will automatically send out an e-mail every morning to all customers whose integration solution(s) have sent more than 50,000 API requests the preceding day. This e-mail will be sent to the superuser of the company – urging him to forward it to his developers or to those of his integration partner.

The notification e-mail will include a breakdown of the integration’s usage of API functions. This breakdown will be useful to the developers who will have to optimise the integrations in question. As always, our technical API support at api@e-conomic.com will be available for developers who need additional information or specific tips on how to optimize their integrations.

Please note that if your integration consistently sends more than 50,000 API requests per day, you will receive this notification e-mail every day! This is not a bug – it’s a feature . We have yet to see an integration that cannot have its daily number of requests reduced to far below 50,000, using nothing but simple optimizations – mainly including efficient usage of the bulk functionality exposed in the API.

Some of the typical optimizations available are:

Using data classes

Optimizing synchronizations

The e-conomic application, as well as the e-conomic API, is now online again.

We are still looking into the cause of the problems earlier today, and will be back with more information.

Suffice to say, we regret the inconveniences caused by this.

Best regards,
e-conomic

The e-conomic application, as well as the e-conomic API, is still offline.

Multiple technicians at both e-conomic and our hosting partner Fujitsu are working hard to resolve this problem.

We will keep you updated with progress information – at least every half hour.

Best regards,
e-conomic

The e-conomic application, as well as the e-conomic API, is currently offline.

We are looking into this right now, and will keep you updated continuously.

Best regards,
e-conomic

On very, very popular demand, we have now added a GetAllUpdated(fromDate) method for debtors/customers, creditors/suppliers, products, projects, and accounts, to the e-conomic API. This returns all entities that have been changed since the specified fromDate (CET).

This will obviously make it possible to achieve massive speed-ups of synchronizations of e.g. customer registers between e-conomic and other systems.

Read more about these functions here.

If you’re using .NET, to use any of these new features, you’ll have to use the latest version of our .NET assembly – which is available here.

Three new features have been added to the API this week:

Price groups are now available
Find customer by e-mail
Accounts now expose their opening account

If you’re using .NET, to use any of these new features, you’ll have to use the latest version of our .NET assembly – which is available here.

When the latest Windows update has occured some customers might have problems with the Invoice tab. The solution is to restore the default internet options under Tools -> Internet Options -> tab: Advanced -> Restore advanced settings.

This will take care of the problem.

We continuouesly strive to improve e-conomic not just as a product and the code behind it, but also the developers that make the code. We do this in many different ways, but one of the ways is to follow other blogs on both what is happening in the bookkeeping business and what is happening in the technical realm.

Read the rest of this entry »

We tend to move around a little at the office mainly to achieve what is summarized in the popular buzz word knowledge sharing. A few weeks ago my turn was up and I was asked if I wanted to transfer to another team working on our future frontend interface, centralized around the Journal. The main objective is speed, performance and usability experience. And the Journal input experience will be very similar to what you see in most spreadsheet applications. This was too exciting, as a backend developer I had to give it a go and this is now my primary concern for the time to come.

Read the rest of this entry »