I start at the end.
Last week you may have noticed Zapiens wasn’t working as well as it used to, you may have detected some bugs, you may not have been able to complete your training or ask Zap something important.
My deepest apologies.
My name is Iván Arrizabalaga, technical director at Zapiens and responsible for you reading this post instead of something more entertaining about kittens, mindfulness, … you know what I mean.
As we have already bothered you enough, I don’t want to make you waste your valuable time with technical monologues, I will only tell you that on the night of
September 27th we will update the system with some changes that will make everything, hopefully, go perfectly well again.
Explanations for curious people
During last year, users and the complexity of our software have been increasing at the same rate. Luckily (or due to the love with which we try to do things) errors, service failures, etc. that usually occur in these cases have not visited us as much as usually happens on many platforms.
However, in the last week our error rate has tripled.
Last month, out of a total of >3M requests, we had an error rate of 0.09%, which is not perfect but the service has worked perfectly okay and all the errors have been minor. Last week that rate rose up to 0.32% and what is worse, some of our customers have accessed the pre version… arggg.
What happened?
Well, actually, nothing too bad, we are more workers than ever, you train more, you ask Zap more and some of the requests can not be met at the necessary speed in order to prevent timeouts.
What are we going to do?
Basically we are doing 3 things:
– Clean the database, deleting outdated information that slowed down some processes.
– Optimize the question generation process for a user.
– Implement a transparent retry policy. Until now, everything worked okay at first, so we did not have to contemplate this possibility; from now on we will take it into account.
I’m finishing…
If you have read up until the end, thank you! It’s important to make a project as beautiful as Zapiens but it doesn’t make sense if it’s not done with transparency and responsibility.
Regards.
Iván.