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 maintenanceâ€.
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 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
Dear citizens, we are experiencing much higher than expected server loads and are working to fix the issue (ie switching to better hosting) we are very sorry for the inconvenience and hope we will have erepublik “the new world” back up and stable asap.
After little more than 1 week of launching the beta version of the erepublik world we have reached 1000 citizens. Several hundred more have pre-registered and are at this time waiting for an invitation to join our young but fast growing world.
A big thank you to all of the citizens for joining us in building a different world history, we apologise for the bugs you may have encountered, some of you have really been outstanding at helping us spot them. We are all working round the clock to fix them and bring you improvements. The present beta version is the very early beginning and a lot of additional functionality will be added over the next few weeks and months as soon as we have finsihed correcting the major bugs.
We have also been amazed at how smart some of the citizens have been and how they already have used the large liberty and interaction we have built into erepublik to invent new ways we honestly hadn´t tough about to overcome the challenges in growing their citizen, their country, companies, newspapers or political parties. A lot of the improvements we will bring in the future will be a direct result of this and of your suggestions.
After one week we can already share with you a few initial basic stats (from google analytics):
The average citizen visits erepublik at least once per day, in his visit he stays an average of 18m58 minutes and views 25 pages. depending on the day beetween 80 and 180 new citizens are born and about 150 people ask for an invite and join the waiting list. Oh and erepublik citizens really like firefox (56%).
Again thank you to all citizens from the erepublik dev team.
Quick video thanks on seesmic.com: http://www.seesmic.com/Standalone.html?video=BFVkbze35m
2 days after beta launch, more than 100 companies have been founded in erepublik. Looks like the erepublik world citizens are of the entrepreneurial kind! There are even business newspapers that have been created in certain countries to track the emerging erepublik economy.How much time before the FT does a comprehensive guide on erepublik start ups? ;o)
We are really happy that Cathy, Geraldine and Loic are giving us the opportunity with another 29 start ups to present at the LeWeb3 start up competion on December 11 from 11h20 to 11h30. You can see all the details and purchase tickets to attend the conference if you haven´t done so yet on www.leweb3.com
Today 20th of November at around 18h30 we launched erepublik.com. This is a invitation only beta launch at this stage. We have erased all the test accounts so that new users can find a “virgin world” and have sent an invite to the close to 400 people who had pre-registered. We would like to thank you all for your pacience and hope that you will enjoy the erepublik.com world.
If you havent´received an invitation you can request one from the homepage: www.erepublik.com and we will get one to you as soon as we can but priority is given to invitations sent by the first erepublik.com citizens (they each get 5 invitations).
