venta

Yesterday 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.

( Does anyone know much about large-scale servers? )

Anyone need a spare ticket for NMA at the Kentish Town Forum this evening?

(Not a friend who can't use a calendar, this time, but a friend who's snowed in in darkest Scotland.)

Edit Taken, by ulfilias.

If you think you need to send me his number, or him my number, you don't, we're sorted now thanks :)

Glastonbury tickets go on sale (way earlier than usual) today. Other years, buying tickets online has involved spending hours glued to a browser which won't load pages, complicated phonecalls to people who've been able to load the buying page, all manner of things.

Last year four of us made a concerted attack from four locations; despite having been up very late at a hen night in Henley, I was in the office in Reading before 9am. ChrisC was in his office. Carolyn was at her home. Simon went to a friend's. We were ready... in the end, of course, the tickets didn't sell out til well into the actual festival. We didn't know that, though, and we had an hour or so's frantic communication on ICQ and phones until Carolyn bagged our tickets.

This year's plan was a bit calmer, since we weren't expecting a rush. Less go-to-the-office and more reach-out-of-bed-for-laptop. We got a call at half past eight: Carolyn had already bought the tickets, half an hour before the official start-time of the sale.

I hadn't even woken up and reached for the laptop yet.

Actually... I feel kind of cheated. I think I might go and find a webpage which times out and try to load it for a while.