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Ticketday: Whats your Internetspeed? Importance?


tullux
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10 minutes ago, tullux said:

What is your experience with different speeds?

How important is it to get through?

I will try with 50 Mbit/s, wich in my Opinion is quite good.

But what do you think is the minimum to have a chance?

   

your internet speed makes as good as no difference at all.

Everyone is sending a request for a page. Whether you get the booking page is all about the moment your request hits the See servers, and not about how quickly it reaches those servers.

You only get the booking page if there's a spare slot for the booking page at the moment your request hits those servers.

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31 minutes ago, tullux said:

so is the speed only important to have more tries by f5 because the site built up faster?

internet speed probably doesn't even increase the number of times you'd be able to press F5 during the sale, because the absolutely-tiny amount of difference in every try you make probably won't add up over the sale to give you one extra try.

It might make a noticeable difference if the different speeds you were thinking about were an old dial-up modem and a 100Mbps connection, but when the difference is something like an 8Mbps connection and the 50Mbps connection you're talking about, it's as an irrelevance.

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Tethering to 3g/4g isn't a bad idea at all - mobiles seem to have decent success, so to combine that with the ability to enter info quickly might be a good option.

There was a thread on here once about the idea that the See servers rotate through batches of ip addresses - to help throttle volume - so it may well be that if this is true, the mobile option may have an advantage (proportionately few on 3g/4g v. standard wifi/t'internet)?

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What's usually sold as 'speed' isn't speed of connection, it's the capacity to deliver large amounts of data faster. The bookings page is very small though, so anybody using any kind of broadband connection won't notice any difference. 

As pointed out it's latency that's the measure of speed of connection, but on the day even that won't make any difference. As Neil has said, it's a matter of your request arriving when a slot is open. If your request arrives when no slots are available you'll have no joy - another request arriving a few milliseconds later may find one has just opened. It's a bit like trying to hit double top on a spinning dartboard when you're blindfolded. All you can do is try as many times as possible and hope one hits the spot. 

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26 minutes ago, hfuhruhurr said:

Tethering to 3g/4g isn't a bad idea at all - mobiles seem to have decent success, so to combine that with the ability to enter info quickly might be a good option.

There was a thread on here once about the idea that the See servers rotate through batches of ip addresses - to help throttle volume - so it may well be that if this is true, the mobile option may have an advantage (proportionately few on 3g/4g v. standard wifi/t'internet)?

Every year there are stories of how 3G was better than wireless Internet, and Chrome was better than IE.  Almost without exception however it's purely anecdotal and there is very rarely any technical evidence to prove that any method is better than another.  

In the event of significant issues occurring it's often possible, due to some knowledge of how the system works, to explain what happened after the occurrence (last year's unresponsive 'white-page' for instance which was likely due to an unresponsive server erroneously advertising availability and a subsequent 'cookie of doom' being issued).  Given the speed of the sale these days, and the need to stay focused during the whole exercise, it's nigh impossible to simultaneously monitor See's systems to such a degree that it could give you any advantage, without at the same time jeopardising your chances.

Ref See's servers 'rotating through IP's' you're likely referring to discussions around the 'load-balancing' technology they employ to distribute sessions across the 3 servers used for the main sale.  Since this happens automatically there is no advantage to be gained from hitting any single server over another (as can be achieved through editing your Hosts file) unless there is good reason to suggest that one server is more lightly loaded than another - as was the case a few years back when DNS advertised an incorrect IP for one of the servers (spotted I think by Neil...) and a lot of folks hacked their Hosts to the correct IP and got tickets very easily.  

These days it's far less about how quickly you can get to the front door, and more about being first with your hand in the air when the doorman says there is a place available inside.

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5 minutes ago, parsonjack said:

Every year there are stories of how 3G was better than wireless Internet, and Chrome was better than IE.  Almost without exception however it's purely anecdotal and there is very rarely any technical evidence to prove that any method is better than another.  

In the event of significant issues occurring it's often possible, due to some knowledge of how the system works, to explain what happened after the occurrence (last year's unresponsive 'white-page' for instance which was likely due to an unresponsive server erroneously advertising availability and a subsequent 'cookie of doom' being issued).  Given the speed of the sale these days, and the need to stay focused during the whole exercise, it's nigh impossible to simultaneously monitor See's systems to such a degree that it could give you any advantage, without at the same time jeopardising your chances.

Ref See's servers 'rotating through IP's' you're likely referring to discussions around the 'load-balancing' technology they employ to distribute sessions across the 3 servers used for the main sale.  Since this happens automatically there is no advantage to be gained from hitting any single server over another (as can be achieved through editing your Hosts file) unless there is good reason to suggest that one server is more lightly loaded than another - as was the case a few years back when DNS advertised an incorrect IP for one of the servers (spotted I think by Neil...) and a lot of folks hacked their Hosts to the correct IP and got tickets very easily.  

These days it's far less about how quickly you can get to the front door, and more about being first with your hand in the air when the doorman says there is a place available inside.

That sounds like a pretty good writeup to me.  In fact fiddling with the hosts file could cause you issues - you've effectively removed the load balancer's ability to route you to the least busy server.  To continue your metaphor, it's as if you're going to ignore all but one of the doormen when they say there's a place available.

To clarify my earlier comment, I'm only suggested the tethering will help when using a satellite link, since the latency is so poor for these links.  In theory wired broadband has a faster latency than a mobile connection, but I don't think it makes much difference.

Personally, I'll be using a wired desktop, a wi-fi laptop and a tethered laptop.  Maybe a phone too.  I'm only using wi-fi because I don't have enough spare Ethernet ports in my office to wire the laptop up too.  Wi-fi would never give any advantage over wired, but again I'm not convinced it will give any appreciable disadvantage either.

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17 hours ago, stuartbert two hats said:

 Wi-fi would never give any advantage over wired, but again I'm not convinced it will give any appreciable disadvantage either.

I think I'd agree.....the days of flaky wifi dropping out at the crucial moment are pretty much gone to be honest.  I used a wired laptop for last year's main sale but eventually got through (after getting the unresponsive white page on IE) with my Android tablet on home Virgin wifi....and I also then got 2 tickets in resale on wifi from a hotel in Budapest.

I'll stick with wired this year through paranoia only, but if wifi is your only option I also don't think you're at any disadvantage.

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10 hours ago, nikkic said:

This thread is like a foreign language to me. 

Ignore the tech speak...we're just geeks who no-one wants a night out with.

In essence were simply saying that what you use to connect, over what speed, and with what browser is unlikely to give any advantage these days. You'll see anecdotes suggesting otherwise but almost to a case there is no conclusive evidence to back them up.

What matter nowadays is simply having a good F5 technique, and a whole shedload of luck.

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3 hours ago, parsonjack said:

Ignore the tech speak...we're just geeks who no-one wants a night out with.

In essence were simply saying that what you use to connect, over what speed, and with what browser is unlikely to give any advantage these days. You'll see anecdotes suggesting otherwise but almost to a case there is no conclusive evidence to back them up.

What matter nowadays is simply having a good F5 technique, and a whole shedload of luck.

Nicely said.

There's no technical know-how that can improve your chances, outside of See messing something up - as they did a few years ago, when the hosts file hack got round their cock-up. You can be sure they won't make the same cock-up again, tho.

 

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Interesting thread, though there are indeed parts I don't understand.

I once got Springsteen tickets from an internet café in Kenya with antique computers so anything is possible.

Excuse the ignorant question though, but what is a good F5 technique?  I usually keep pressing F5 in one window and have the 20 second countdown/automatic refresh on in another.

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1 hour ago, eFestivals said:

Nicely said.

There's no technical know-how that can improve your chances, outside of See messing something up - as they did a few years ago, when the hosts file hack got round their cock-up. You can be sure they won't make the same cock-up again, tho.

 

Odd that See would present a public IP for any of the backend servers (behind the load balancer) at all really. You'd think it would be a single public IP (and DNS record) for the load balancer, and all the back end servers would be on an internal and unrouted network.

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49 minutes ago, Watergirl said:

 

Excuse the ignorant question though, but what is a good F5 technique?  I usually keep pressing F5 in one window and have the 20 second countdown/automatic refresh on in another.

Pretty much it I'd say....start F5'ing before the sale starts....then when you get the 20 second countdown page hit F5 to load it again...and again....and again.  Aim to F5 as soon as the page loads and def before the timer hits 19.  Then repeat until you either get a booking page....or it says sold out.  That way you either get lucky or if not you know you couldn't have done anything more.

Oh, and if you want to leave a window auto-refreshing do it on another device, or at least a different browser on same device - simply using a second tab in the same browser won't give you any advantage as it'll refresh every time you manually refresh the other.

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43 minutes ago, Pinhead said:

 

Odd that See would present a public IP for any of the backend servers (behind the load balancer) at all really. You'd think it would be a single public IP (and DNS record) for the load balancer, and all the back end servers would be on an internal and unrouted network.

Puzzles me too.....

They have at least 3 server farms though....do a DNS lookup right now and you'll get 2 different  IP's to the usual 3.....109's instead of 194's.....

 

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