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geeky techie chat about the ticket sale


Swine_Glasto2014
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no-one knows really. If you got through on a link you'll think it was a good one. The same with which OS/device/location etc people used and were successful. The truth is it's chance and some get through and some don't.

This year I got straight in on the official link and nowhere with the efests links, other years I got through on a efests link. I reckon it's nothing more than to do with when my page refreshed

Edited by storm
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while it may have been true in the past - these days its more down to luck.
Two of my WBC Team work for the Company Seeticket uses and they have direct control over what Servers that can be used as they try to balance the lines out { its all very technical but in its basic form - they are adjusting the auto balance software - its just a click of a mouse and servers can go on and off line }
in the past they did notice some unusual activity but by the time they got authority to shut it down - most had slipped though the queue { people who were passing on links using social media }
They have new instructions in place just so they can make it as a fair as possible.
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while it may have been true in the past - these days its more down to luck.

Two of my WBC Team work for the Company Seeticket uses and they have direct control over what Servers that can be used as they try to balance the lines out { its all very technical but in its basic form - they are adjusting the auto balance software - its just a click of a mouse and servers can go on and off line }

in the past they did notice some unusual activity but by the time they got authority to shut it down - most had slipped though the queue { people who were passing on links using social media }

They have new instructions in place just so they can make it as a fair as possible.

Do you know what they're using on the back-end? Is it Azure or AWS or something in-house? As a developer, I'd love to know all the gory technical details behind See!

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Do you know what they're using on the back-end? Is it Azure or AWS or something in-house? As a developer, I'd love to know all the gory technical details behind See!

They don't go into great detail as after all to them its just Work - I will ask them the next time they are on my Team but that will not be until next year.
I would imagine that they are using some custom built software as they spend most of their time fine tuning it.
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I haven't worked for See, but I have worked for an e-commerce site which is a market leader, millions of transactions a year.

For the techies, you have your internet traffic coming into two perimeter firewalls (normally), then probably down into two load-balancing boxes, e.g. a Citrix Netscaler (many other products out there!).

They can be set up to balance traffic between your web servers. From my understanding, See Tickets (after previous years' farces) now have DEDICATED web servers JUST for Glasto ticket buyers (so the whole site doesn't crash). Which is why there's the http://www.glastonbury.seetickets.com link

This may direct traffic evenly into any number of servers at maybe 500 a time. Any time you make a request, that journey starts again and you could be directed to any of them.

When you click from reg details through to payment, it SHOULD direct it to a new server, so that you're not just adding to traffic already massively hampering the other servers. I think they sorted that last year, so there was less crashing from reg to payment.

The problem the other year, was that they had two dedicated web servers, but screwed up the DNS settings for one (absolute schoolboy error and should have been spotted way before the sale), so only one was working. If you could force your PC to physically going to that (by altering your Hosts file), you were in. If not, you were battling hard just to get on one server.

Sorry for the tech speak, but See Tickets have obviously started to employ some people who know what they're doing - and the process is much much smoother than previous years.

Edited by Stu H
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Oh, and they would appear to finally have some decent load balancing kit.

It was startling the difference yesterday. Virtually no time-outs at all, just a message saying "Tickets are currently unavailable. Please try again later." after entering HMV's reg details. It does seem to be a radically different set-up to previous years.

I am wondering about whether it's actually counter productive to have multiple groups trying for each other's tickets this year. Given the experience last night (only one group managed to get to the purchasing page, despite about 4 or 5 of us trying) and the following quote from the FAQ

Stick to one tab, in one window, so you can focus on entering your details without confusing your browser. Access to the booking page is limited to 10 minutes from the point you enter your registration details, so if you have lots of tabs refreshing the same page, the clock will start as soon as the first one of those tabs hits the site, which may have been a window you weren’t keeping an eye on.

nope, it's something 'off the shelf' - tho I can't remember what.

Ticket sales sites like SeeTickets seem absolutely ideal for cloud computing, a few years ago when AWS and Azure were just getting going, it would be the obvious use case everyone would bring up when asking when it would make economic sense to use the cloud. Well, that and florists the week of Mother's day. Using the cloud, they don't need to own all the infrastructure for spikes in the demand

I think hard-core techie talk is allowed this week - the one time I can combine both my main interests in life - computers and Glasto!

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I would avoid the multiple tabs thing, that's pretty good advice.

It's probably working based on your IP address, so if it gets a connection, the timing starts. It won't care about browser, machine you're using, what country you're in or how many cups of coffee you've had - it's just pot luck! :)

Let me try and describe some of these bits of kit. Next gen firewalls (which I hope See Tickets have!) and load balancers can do some very funky things. They can restrict access based on all sorts of things; e.g. country. They COULD realistically set up a web server JUST for foreign traffic. I'm not sure why they would want to do that, but it's possible.

The kit will be looking out for signs of stress, DDOS attacks etc - but that would be thousands if not millions of hits in a small period of time (and from differing machines for the same attack) - so it doesn't matter how fast your refresh finger is, you'll be fine!!

As an IT Security bod who knows the set up of these kind of things, I would have 2 or 3 people trying for you, in a couple of different physical locations, stick to one browser and just keep refreshing.

It really is luck folks.

Good luck to us all - I'm nervous too!

Edited by Stu H
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They use Riverbed Stingray to load balance....they had 3 servers hosting landing pages last night....same IP's as last year and when they made the DNS cock up.

So they've gone from 2 to 3 dedicated web servers - which is why there's a marked improvement.

They've obviously started employing people to actually stress test these things - which I couldn't believe they made such a screw-up of in previous years!

As for their tweets about IT techies - well, yes, perhaps they should have employed some of us a few years ago! :-)

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So they've gone from 2 to 3 dedicated web servers - which is why there's a marked improvement.

They've obviously started employing people to actually stress test these things - which I couldn't believe they made such a screw-up of in previous years!

As for their tweets about IT techies - well, yes, perhaps they should have employed some of us a few years ago! :-)

They had 3 on last year too for the main sale. The third got added to the farm at about 0830 and I posted the IP's on here somewhere.

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