This post addresses the service interruptions Assistly experienced on November 9-11. We want our customers to have detailed information about what we are doing to restore their service. (For additional background, please refer to: No Excuses and Detailed Background on Service Interruption).

This post has been revised to encompass updates for both Wednesday and Thursday, 11/16 – 11/17.

Wednesday and Thursday marked another two days of unimpeded operation of Assistly. Assistly operated without incident and met or exceeded all of its performance goals.

During tonight’s [Thursday's] maintenance window we will deploy a set of performance optimizations that will reduce the load on our search servers by a factor of 5. This will greatly improve the capacity and stability of our search servers which power our agent desktop.

These performance optimizations will have a slight side-effect in your agent desktop, which should be hardly noticeable, but we wanted to point it out in case you have questions.

As you know, case filters in the sidebar of the agent desktop include a live “count” of the number of cases in each filter.

These counts are regularly updated by Assistly’s servers. Prior to tonight’s upgrade, our servers would update the counts for every case filter simultaneously without giving any priority to the most important case filter—the one you are currently using. With tonight’s update, Assistly gets a bit smarter and prioritizes the case filter you are currently using and updates the counts for other case filters in the background. The case filter you are currently using is up-to-the-moment accurate and every other case filter is updated at least once every 150 seconds. Moreover, as before, if you stop using the agent desktop for a long period of time (if you, for instance, walk away for 5-30 minutes), Assistly will go into an “energy saving” mode until you come back and start working again. You can instantly update any case filter by clicking it, so you are never more than a click away from a perfectly accurate count.

One great side-effect of this change: Now when you click a case filter it will open and display its contents a bit faster. It might not be that noticeable, but it’s about twice as fast as it was before.

We expect these changes to improve your overall experience, but we’re interested in hearing your feedback. We will be looking to fine-tune the refresh rate and behavior to give you the optimal experience. If you have any suggestions, leave them in the comment space on this blog or send an email to support@assistly.com.