Unfortunately the ongoing problems with dawsonera e-books have still not been resolved and there is still no timeline for a fix. The last update was sent on Friday 17 October and is copied below:
“Dear Customer,
You will be aware of the poor performance of the dawsonera site over the last three weeks. This has manifested itself in intermittent downtime and significantly slower responses when users access the site, read e-books and turn pages. We want to acknowledge that this service is well below the expected levels we have set for our e-book platform and want to update you on why this has happened, what we are doing now and over the next weeks to address the issues as well as the timelines we have set ourselves.
One of the main contributing factors to site performance is the load on the system. The numbers we forecast for site traffic this year have been exceeded to the point where the user activity has grown by 200% year on year.
Over the last weeks we have carried out a significant number of adjustments to the infrastructure, website and databases to improve overall performance. These incremental changes have started to have the impact of the site being significantly more stable over the last two days than in the previous weeks, although we recognise there is more work required to deliver the necessary performance.
Our approach currently is to focus on the stability of the site and our teams are working 24/7 to ensure an incremental improvement over this week and next. Whilst we realise the progress appears slow to our customers and their patrons it is critical that we make these adjustments as a series of incremental changes in order to protect the service availability status as much as possible. We have tried to always schedule downtime around midnight and will continue to take this approach to minimise disruption to service as we make these important changes. Examples of some of the activities we have performed over the last two days are:
- Last night we implemented multiple server configuration changes. We also upgraded the Load Balancer VMWare processor and these have rendered dawsonera much more stable over the last 48 hours. We will continue to monitor to ensure the site continues to respond well under high loads over the next days and into next week.
- Furthermore we have called on all available resource and used development partners to establish timescales for a further plan of enhancements for next week. Our software development partners will be on site working at Dawson to identify performance bottlenecks using data we have collected over the last few weeks.
We estimate that over the next two weeks we will make significant improvements to the site stability and also be able to enhance overall performance. As we roll out our plans we will continue to make every effort to prevent intermittent outages and we do expect the number of these to decrease over time. We will continue to keep you updated via email and Twitter and expect to give further detailed updates at the end of each week in respect of our overall progress. We ask for your continued patience whilst we work through these tasks and can assure you of our focus and determination to return this service to the expected standard as quickly as possible. We also thank you for your feedback and messages of encouragement whilst we focus on this over the last weeks.”