Important info please read

Day 10, 00:00 • Published in USA • by Plato

Dear Citizens,

Yesterday was a crazy day, the first real first big test for the admin. With the population growth the number of queries to our database and servers jumped trough the roof. At some points of the evening we had more than 200 simultaneous citizens in erepublik plus several more trying to get in. As a result a few of you might have seen a not very nice page stating that we were doing "server maintenance". |||To be more specific what we had to do is streamline a lot of the queries because due to the very large stats system and points system that we have, erepublik.com creates a lot more queries than a normal website. So when we have 200 concurrent citizens in our world the load on the servers and database is the same as if we had 2000.

We had planned the "beta" to be able to hold 500 concurrent citizens but hadn't counted on the huge number of queries. The result is that although during the day yesterday we managed to streamline several of the scripts and add server power therefore doubling our capacity that still wasn't enough.

We are going to double again our capacity today and have started working on a much more scalable hosting solution but we will need a few days to move to it. Also we didn't want to make such a major change just before the elections.

So in order to be able to deliver the required performance to all citizens and avoid major server outages we have decided to take the following temporary measures:

- All new citizens will from now on only receive 2 invitations instead of the 5 usual invitations. This is the only way we have to keep the growth somewhat under control, of course we want our little world to grow as much as you but not at the detriment of every users experience.

- We have removed for the moment the country ranking points system and replaced it with each countries present population. This was one of the major query loads on the database and it was not working properly anyway (bug). No points have been lost, we are working on fixing the points system bug and will put it back on as soon as it is fixed and that we have moved to our new hosting solution.

- We will be looking at other things like the points system that cause large server loads and might have to disable them from time to time, we will do our best to limit this to non critical functionality.

We are doing everything we can so that we have a lot less issues today and give you as good an experience as we can.

Thank you all for being a part of the erepublik adventure, we might have had no sleep yesterday but we are thrilled by the positive responses of so many of you.


The erepublik admin team