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.

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