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.

This entry was posted on 4 March 2010 at 10:45 am and is filed under Miscellaneous. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.