We’re happy to announce that phase 1 of our previously mentioned storage upgrade has now been completed – and rather successfully at that, with e-conomic being fully available more than 4 hours earlier than initially publicized. As such, the move itself actually reaped the first benefit of our faster storage

Regardless, we once again regret any inconveniences caused by e-conomic being offline.

In order to support our continued growth, as well as improve performance, we’ll be moving to faster storage media during the next two weekends.

Therefore, both the e-conomic application and API will be offline during the following two periods:

Friday, July 23rd 10pm CET through Saturday, July 24th 6am CET

Friday, July 30th 10pm CET through Saturday, July 31st 6am CET

We will of course keep you updated throughout this, as well as when we’re online again.

We regret any inconvenience caused by this – but we also look forward to welcoming you back to a faster e-conomic.

Following up on our last performance update, we have made a number of changes to both our hardware and software setup – working on multiple levels, such as optimizing code, tweaking our network infrastructure, updating storage, etc..

Regarding code optimization, a number of tweaks have been made. This should be particularly obvious when bulk-synchronizing data via the e-conomic API, or in general use of the Stock Management module (although said Stock Management module does still reduce the speed of a lot of operations, due to the much more complex housekeeping required).

A major change is a move of our database from traditional mechanical disks to flash (memory-based) disks. In addition to a general performance increase, this also results in much more consistent performance, thus resulting in fewer extreme peaks. This isn’t the end of our storage performance improvements, however – during the summer, we will be moving our entire setup to even faster storage.

On the database software side, we are currently looking into an update of both the database engine and operating system. However, such updates always involve a certain risk – both in terms of performance and compatibility – a risk we’re currently working hard to resolve.

Once again, a new feature, as well as some bug fixes, have found their way to the e-conomic API.

In the new features department, cash book entries – as represented by the ICashBookEntry class – now have an Employee property. This effectively allows you to add per-employee costs to projects – just like you can already add time entries.

Additionally, two annoying bugs have been fixed:

When adding lines to a subscription, an exception is no longer thrown if no Department is specified (thanks to Claus Aaberg for reporting this in our API forum).

The recently-introduced new entry type ManualDebtorInvoice – allowing you to create customer invoice entries without creating actual invoices – can now be created with the DueDate property set.

As a final note – please remember that we’re always more than interested in your comments, questions and suggestions in our API forum.

Hello.My name is Christian and I have an addiction; an addiction to constantly look for ways to do things easier in front of a computer. In more technical terms and from a usability point of view: how to minimize the number of steps on frequently performed work flows or to put it in laymen terms:

How to work without ever reaching for the mouse.

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The planned system upgrade 1-2 April has been completed earlier than announced and e-conomic is now available again (from 4:15 pm 2 April).

Some of the tasks planned for this maintenance took longer than we expected. The remaining tasks will be carried out at a later date and time to be announced. We will do our very best to interrupt you as little as possible.

Sorry again for any inconvenience this scheduled maintenance might have caused you.

Now continue your Easter lunch

Due to numerous request for new languages from our users, we are releasing several new languages and currencies that will be available to our users after the Easter holidays. The languages that will be released are Quenya, Na’Vi, Klingon, and Lingua Franca, and both Republic (REC) and Federation Credits (FEC) will also be availabe as currencies. 

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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.