World Series Ticket Sales Overwhelm Servers

vlakkies writes "The Colorado Rockies Major League Baseball team decided to only sell tickets for the World Series games at Coors Field online. As a result of overwhelming interest, the ticket vendor Paciolan experienced a system meltdown resulting in a suspension of all ticket sales."

Contract with Akamai

[Volante3192]

With all these one time, massive bandwidth incidents (In Rainbows earlier this month and now this) it seems to me it might make sense to rent out to Akamai (or maybe Google could pick up some petty cash), at least until the beginning demand slows down.

Sure, wouldn't make sense after the initial week, but this is becoming a major joke lately. These places always seem to underestimate demand by a factor of, like, hundreds.

You'd be indeed too late.

[NeutronCowboy]

Frickin Hannah Montana tickets are being snapped up by professional scalpers within ten minutes of the lines opening. Arbitrage is cool, but in cases like these, I don't know... I mean, it's great if an artist sells out their venues, but I'm pretty sure it sucks if only 10% of the people manage to actually get a real ticket. Can you imagine Wembley stadium half empty for a Rolling Stones Concert? Or MSG 1/10 full for a Police concert? Kinda defeats the purpose of performing.

Scalpers' plans fell through

[magarity]

There are hundreds of auctions on eBay under one seller yesterday before the tickets even went on sale promising that he could get them; now they're all removed. Did his plan to hammer the system fail because too many people were trying to buy or did 1 jackass would-be scalper bring the thing down?

A hell of a pain in the ass indeed..

[appleguru]

As a Boston native living and going to school in Colorado I was ecstatic when the sox beat the Indians last night... Figuring I'd have as good a shot as anyone at scoring some tickets to a game I brought my MacBook Pro to class and logged on at 9:45. I was greeted by their countdown page, which auto-reloaded every minute.

Just seconds after 10AM mountain time, the site (evenue.net) became completely unresponsive. After about an hour of reloading and fighting with the system, I finally got in. I was able to (excruciatingly slowly) pick seats and get to my shopping cart. After that they took me to a captcha (which didn't load), and following that to a registration page to take all my info and credit card number.

Hitting submit on that page caused an hour long hang that eventually just kicked my back out to the waiting page. I had several family members across the country try to get in as well, all with no success.

What's interesting though is it seems that evenue was using a load balancing system to automatically assign the end user to one of their servers...

Over the course of trying to get tickets I was connected to ev14.evenue.net, ev15.evenue.net, ev9.evenue.net, ev5.evenue.net, and finally (the server that got me through), ev8.evenue.net.

I'm willing to bet that their all on the same backbone connection though, and from the way things went I can't imagine it being any fatter than a 45mbps link.. then again, 8.5 million hits in an hour *is* a lot. In order to sustain that load from a single datacenter (not that they'd have to, but from the sounds of it they were; all their servers seem to be in the same datacenter in California) they'd need, oh, 8,500,000/60/60*56/1024 ~130Mb/s... which really isn't that much at all (that's assuming a 56kbps connection per person for a reasonable experience on the site).

So what it really boils down to, then, is the inefficiency of their server code and the number of servers they have. From the failover numbers it looks like they only had ~20 servers handling this... And from the design of their site (Lots of java :/) it looks like each server couldn't handle more than a few simultaneous requests. This is likely why they have a "waiting" page in place (Ex: http://pleasehold.evenue.net/ev/rockies-st/PleaseHold.html?ev8.evenue.net/cgi-bin/ncommerce3/SEGetEventInfo?ticketCode=GS%3AROCKIES-ST%3APS07%3AWSA%3A&linkID=rockies-st&shopperContext=&caller=&appCode= [evenue.net] ), which appears to be served by independent servers... but if the behavior of my friends is any indication, every user looking to buy tickets had at LEAST 5 windows open at once trying to load the same page...

In any case, the Rockies are new at this ;) Normal game tickets can be had for as little as $4/each during the regular season... and they haven't EVER been to the world series. They've made a hellof a lot of new fans seemingly overnight, and now everyone wants a piece of the action. Coors field, at least, is a good place to see it. It's a very well build stadium and their really isn't a bad seat in the house! (Unlike Fenway, where there are many. But I like Fenway better for other reasons :)). Ah well, wish me luck tomorrow, or whenever they decide to put the tickets on sale again on their new "fixed" yet exactly the same as before system...