Let's play master and servant
Oct. 7th, 2013 12:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ventaYesterday was the annual F5-fest of Glastonbury tickets going on sale. Which was made considerably more protracted because Seetickets were having "technical issues" for the first 30 minutes of the sale period.
I was also watching #glastonbury on the twitters. Lots of people berated Seetickets for their poor timing in having "technical issues" the day Glasto tickets go on sale. Er, y'know? I don't think it's coincidental. I think we, the Glastonbury punters, pretty much are the technical issues.
From the numbers I've seen, there were a million people registered to buy 135,000 tickets. That means a lot of disappointed people. And that's not Seetickets' fault. Once the issues were resolved, Seetickets were churning through 3000 ticket sales a minute on servers that were being hit by many times more people than that. Servers really aren't my specialist area, but I'm pretty sure that's not a trivial problem to solve. Compared to a decade ago, the ticket sales are incredibly smoothly handled.
However! One thing did baffle me. ChrisC and I sat on the sofa with three laptops between us, all hooked to the same wi-fi signal. His two laptops fairly consistently loaded the holding page which auto-reloaded itself and (eventually) popped you through to the actual payment page. My laptop consistently failed with the "connection to server was reset" message.
For an hour.
At one point I had two browser tabs open, and they both simultaneously loaded the holding page. They both auto-refreshed after ten seconds, and returned to the "connection reset" error. That was the only time I saw an actual page load on my machine.
Needless to say, ChrisC bought the tickets. I'm just confused as to how it's possible. Some sort of glitch in the server load-balancing software? Does it send (say) machines with differing IP addresses through different routes? I remember an incident at my old workplace where someone was trying to access a server whose load-balancing algorithm routed machines based on IP address parity (and the server handling "even" addresses was down). But I assume Seetickets are a bit more clueful than that.
I was also watching #glastonbury on the twitters. Lots of people berated Seetickets for their poor timing in having "technical issues" the day Glasto tickets go on sale. Er, y'know? I don't think it's coincidental. I think we, the Glastonbury punters, pretty much are the technical issues.
From the numbers I've seen, there were a million people registered to buy 135,000 tickets. That means a lot of disappointed people. And that's not Seetickets' fault. Once the issues were resolved, Seetickets were churning through 3000 ticket sales a minute on servers that were being hit by many times more people than that. Servers really aren't my specialist area, but I'm pretty sure that's not a trivial problem to solve. Compared to a decade ago, the ticket sales are incredibly smoothly handled.
However! One thing did baffle me. ChrisC and I sat on the sofa with three laptops between us, all hooked to the same wi-fi signal. His two laptops fairly consistently loaded the holding page which auto-reloaded itself and (eventually) popped you through to the actual payment page. My laptop consistently failed with the "connection to server was reset" message.
For an hour.
At one point I had two browser tabs open, and they both simultaneously loaded the holding page. They both auto-refreshed after ten seconds, and returned to the "connection reset" error. That was the only time I saw an actual page load on my machine.
Needless to say, ChrisC bought the tickets. I'm just confused as to how it's possible. Some sort of glitch in the server load-balancing software? Does it send (say) machines with differing IP addresses through different routes? I remember an incident at my old workplace where someone was trying to access a server whose load-balancing algorithm routed machines based on IP address parity (and the server handling "even" addresses was down). But I assume Seetickets are a bit more clueful than that.
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no subject
Date: 2013-10-08 09:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-10-08 09:11 am (UTC)I don't think it'd quite formalise what's happening (though obviously there's a big lottery element to the way they're sold at the moment). I think lots of people register with vague interest, but then don't go on to try and buy tickets. A colleague of mine intended to buy tickets, but forgot they were going on sale. At present, I think the tickets are bough by those who are keen enough to get up and spend an hour faffing about on a Sunday morning fighting with the website - so the tickets go to the keenest[*]. Which is an interesting idea. I'm not sure it is a good idea.
(I'm not sure if Olympics tickets were resellable, so if you got tickets you then decided not to use you could sell them on. You can't with Glastonbury tickets.)
[*] In general. Obviously there will be cases where mad Glasto nuts were unable to get to a PC, or are very keen but highly disorganised, etc.
no subject
Date: 2013-10-08 09:04 pm (UTC)They certainly had the same "we want the most passionate, not the most rich. Except for all the corporate entertainment stuff: that's different" thing going on that Glastonbury goes for.