eRepublik, behind the scenes

Day 668, 06:06 • Published in • by Plato

Dear citizens,

We would like to share with you some of our thoughts, hopes and plans for the remaining months of this year.

Before getting to the future, let's review the past and present. It looks like 2009 has been a successful year so far, in terms of improvements, additions, and growth of eRepublik. Many new modules have been implemented, improving user experience. The explosive growth in terms of citizens, hence page views requests, has caused problems for our servers, from time to time. There is a constant battle between the hard-working databases-servers which would love just to yell “I quiiiiit” and our guys from the IT department trying to keep them up and running, delivering millions of pages per day.  Some citizens have the wrong idea that problems occur due to lack of servers, that is, physical PCs. This is wrong, it is not server-machines that are needed, because the database software is the “rebel” causing problems.  Every citizen, by doing an action, like working, fighting, reading a newspaper, opening a private message, voting, or just looking to his profile, requests information from several interconnected databases.
 
Since the launch of eRepublik two years ago, these databases have been constantly optimized. The proof of that is a simple measurable one: there were times when by having just a small fraction of today`s citizens online, servers would just crash, without a warning. With stress, hard-work, fine-tuning, and lots of coffee, the net result has been that the server are sustaining today many more simultaneously players.Again, buying some additional servers would not help at all, but we have a different approach to increase the number of maximum simultaneous requests. eRepublik is a unique game - there is no software or computer which we could install and solve such problems, unfortunately. Fortunately, we keep working to manually fine-tune and solve different things that “hurt” performance.

Some citizens see “eRepublik staff” as something general, some sort of single person. For instance, if somebody looks through the media in order to find a couple of nice articles, we see comments like “instead of fixing bugs, eRepublik staff read the newspapers.”

This is wrong – there are many departments in eRepublik, each of them having different “jobs” assigned, dispatched in a network. Everybody is doing his or her job, and if we sum up all of the jobs we head toward our goal: to provide citizens with a fine product.

Guys from the development department are working for a new module, other guys from testing are solving bugs, somebody from the design team is drawing the graphic concept needed by the new module in production. In the “obscure chamber” the guys from IT are fighting hard with the server, meanwhile the community department is solving tickets, and so on, all happening simultaneously. So it is not that if one is reading some news, the rest of tens of employees are doing the same thing or “wasting time.” No, each and all of them has his or her task and jobs, that are independent and also interconnected, like a living organism. The net result of the work done this year has already been presented, but in short: server up-time rose from 90 % in January to aroundn 98 % in August, despite the population growing six-fold. Modules like citizenship, citizen ads, the eRepublik map, and request appeal, have been delivered. The development team has done a great job until now, and they`ll keep doing so.They also have other modules being working on, or almost “in the pipe.” 

OK, let's talk about what's to come. Not long ago, last week, the company tools module came live, offering managers needed statistics and information. Some citizens asked for several additions to these tools, but we will postpone them. That is because a team of programmers started the work on the new economic module of eRepublik. Yes, we started to work on a new economic module, a much more complex, diversified and hopefully fun-to-play-with one. The new module will also probably mean the re-draw of the world map in terms of “most valuable regions,” given the fact that some resources might be introduced, while others existent now might disappear or be replaced.

Also, another team of programmers is coding an important project: a new war module. When this module will go live in the beginning of the next year, a much greater number of soldiers will be able to fight simultaneously without crashing the server.The new war module will offer you epic strategic battles (including PvP fights, for which we have been already working for a while ) - future Insiders will offer you details about all of these goodies we are working on. 

In the next two months it's possible that you will occasionally encounter problems when accessing eRepublik, because on one hand we will transit toward a new infrastructure, and on the other hand some modules will be going live. Ever growing variables in the databases ask for work to adjust them. We know that new module implementation brings some bugs usually, but most of them are quickly solved by our maintenance team. Of course, there is always room for improvement, and the guys fighting bugs are determined to better their results.

We also have a surprise for you. Aside from company tools, another new module will come live pretty soon, we are in the final testing phase now. Stay tuned for more details.

Regards,
The eRepublik Team