Time of this notice: 5:30 am London Time February 14 2007
Please read this notice carefully before attempting to write to
[email protected]
Dear EAI Members,
First of all, we would like to apologize that the system has been closed for login and registration since 6 pm London Time February 13th. As you know, 6 pm is our normal closing time every day and we take that time to do the minor daily maintenance issues like bonus payments. Usually we try to complete all of this within 4 hours.
Since this is done at night, most of you have never even noticed that we close each day. As a result, we have been receiving many emails from people who do not know we close every day and wondering why we are "suddenly" closed. The only reason they notice now is because they "woke up" in the morning and see it closed. All these emails are tying down our support staff so we have decided to give a detailed explanation here.
So let us address a few common concerns we are sure you have:
1. Is EAI closed permanently?
Certainly not! We will be open again soon. We are just doing some system improvements which are intended to make they system run more efficiently. We know this is causing a great deal of inconvenience in the field since we are now closed during the daytime today and many of you already had business plans today.
We ask you to keep in mind ... "a little short-term inconvenience equals a lot of long term gain". In fact, you can consider this a GOOD THING. We have well over 200,000 members and growing at more than 10,000 per day and it is increasing exponentially! This makes us the fastest growing program in the world and in fact now -- the strongest as well. We are here to stay and you have NOTHING to be concerned about!
As for "rumors" about us closing, please do not listen to rumors. Intelligent people do not pay heed to such hearsay because intelligent people will write into the company to find out the truth directly from the source and intelligent people will know that it is 3rd parties such as our competition (that is envious of our success) that has the incentive to spread such false rumors.
2. Why is the maintenance taking so long?
Well that is a result of our rapid growth. Underlying all the membership growth is a VERY big database to hold all that information. We have over 50,000,000 (fifty million) records in the database and growing by 10% every day!
To put that in perspective, that means we are doubling our database size every week. 50,000,000 this week will be 100,000,000 (one hundred million) next week. Technically speaking, when a database reaches that size, it gets hard to work with because of the sheer size of it. Nothing is wrong with it -- it is just very big. Backups take longer, transfers take longer, everything takes longer. So when we make database improvements we have to do things to it like -- back it up -- split it up -- transfer it -- verify it.
Each of those processes takes a long time with such a large database. Of course we try not to do those changes often since it has a much larger impact on the time now, but, if we want to keep having a better system there are some days we just all have to accept it is a necessary part of a fast growing system.
3. How much longer will the maintenance take?
We can give an estimate on time. However, please keep in mind it is like this analogy of driving on a highway from one place to another -- you do not know what the traffic conditions are... you know you want to get there as fast as possible... but heavy traffic may take twice as long to get there.
For all you technically inquisitive people: For example, if we are splitting up a database and it has been working 5 hours and stops for some reason. We will need to restart it again from the beginning. Which resets the working time clock back by 5 hours. (This is just an example, not what is happening now).
What is actually being done now: The process which we have started is restoring a copy of the database we made to another location and verifying that file. Based on how far it has progressed, we estimate it will take another 10 hours.
4. Don't you realize I am losing business?
Yes, we do apologize for the great inconvenience this is causing. Please explain to your referrals that the reason for today's delay is because of GROWTH -- and they should rejoice that they are joining a successful program. If we are able to finish this work in 10 hours as anticipated, we will keep the database open until 8pm London Time February 14th to allow you an extra 2 hours to handle registrations and logins.
5. Why can't I log in or register while you are doing all this?
The database is processing records at maximum speed right now. Any interference of that process ... any attempted access or change to the database during that process... would result in stopping the process. That is the reason we have to ensure that nobody (not even us) will interfere with the server doing the work.
6. Will I miss any banking deadline?
No you will not. We will ensure that everyone has enough time to handle the transactions they wish to handle.
7. How can I do my part to help EAI?
The best thing you can do is to stay calm and NOT write into
[email protected] while we are working on this. As we said, we have over 200,000 members. You can imagine what happens when even just 1% of the members write in to ask us the same questions we have just answered in this notice. Our support staff does the best it can to answer all emails quickly and therefore this will bog down our support staff if many members write in. Loading down the support staff to answer these same questions only does two things:
a. It loads down the staff so they cannot attend to matters pertaining to this maintenance process.
b. It loads down the staff so they cannot attend to other member inquiries such as answering questions about how EAI compensation plan works.
We do appreciate that you help us in this regards. That is the part you can play. Of course, if you have other inquiries not related to database maintenance, please feel free to write in and we will continue answering those quickly.
Sincerely,
EAI Support
[email protected]