Seetickets queuing system

[MoonBuggy]

I've been posting in another thread about the connection problems; I'm sceptical that browser choice could make a difference (although it's not impossible), but I do think there was a bug in the way that the SeeTickets system handled the connections - we may well never know, it's all anecdotal evidence from people with a grudge or a great big grin, so it's not exactly unbiased - but there does seem to be a trend and it's certainly a technically feasible issue.

In terms of their server speed, I think it's pretty poor, to be honest. Short term support for maybe half a million users is certainly not a trivial problem, but it's the kind of thing that cloud computing was practically designed for - renting more server power than they could possibly need, since it's only for a few hours, would cost a couple of thousand pounds at the most. The main cost would be porting their software, but a simple single-purpose shopping cart for the big name events (Glasto, Reading/Leeds, etc.) wouldn't be at all complex, in the scheme of things. The See site invariably slows to a crawl or crashes completely when events like this go on sale, and it's entirely avoidable. I'm actually quite surprised they haven't sorted it yet - it's been perfectly viable for a good few years, and the cost would be almost trivial in comparison to the profits they must be making from that £5 booking fee on every ticket.

[J1mbo]

Seetickets queuing system needs to be sorted out. No doubt there are still loads of efesters trying to get tickets and still not even getting the 'in a queue' page. None of my friends have got that far today, but somehow I have. I have so far brought 20 tickets and still trying to get more for friendswho have been trying since 8.30.

Good luck to everyone else trying

[Craigston]

Choice of browser seems to be a significant factor.

[theampersanddevil]

I was on Virign and IE

Had no problem getting the q page and then got in to order by half 9. Was a lot easier after that though, in the time it took to order I had pages up in all my other windows, went out and in about three more times.

Think I just have a good connection, my mate was absolutely nowhere near, lost the q page thanks to the refreshing and then just nothing.

[MoonBuggy]

Any remotely serviceable broadband connection should be plenty fast enough to deal with the data being transferred, and even unfeasibly bad latency would only add a second or two to the wait. I do think there was something funny going on, but it seems to be more nuanced than just browser or connection speed.

[kohoutec]

They really shouldn't call it a queue as it's blatantly just reloading the page every 20 seconds, and as has already been said, it's just pot luck if you get in. Calling it a queue is very misleading as people think if they wait they'll move up the line

[eFestivals]

The queue system was strange we had 3 pc trying from one IP address, my PC got the queuing message on firefox *and* IE, the kids PCs got nothing. I could load as many queue pages as I wanted, but still kids pages just wouldnt load anything

I had 5 tabs doing the normal refreshing themselves every 20 seconds, and one I was pressing F5 on, I got on about 10:20, then when I had finished buying the tickets all the other pages had got through as well

Not sure why the kids couldn't touch it and I could ?

Because things are completely random.

Some get lucky, and some don't.

However it works, some are going to miss out.

[Paadzer]

I tried IE and firefox and got the que screen over 25 times and each time it just crashed. Had to get a friend to get me a ticket as I never once got through as I kept trying after for my friends who were supposed to go with me (but sadly none of them got any tickets)

[marcwilson87]

I have a similar story. Relatively easy for me to get on the bookings page, and whilst I got the boot off it a couple of times, it was fairly painless to get back on. No-one else I know could get through, so I became the de-facto ticket dealer totting up a huge 21 for various extended friends of friends. I should have charged.

Conversely the website point blank refused to accept the registration details of my best mate, despite him only having signed up last year, and having successfully purchesed last years tickets on all the same information.

What gives there?

[airds]

Because things are completely random.

Some get lucky, and some don't.

However it works, some are going to miss out.

[euler]

Absolute shambles of a system. I would have quite happily sat in a queue given the chance ; but I sat at my machine for 4.5 hours without a sniff of even getting into the queue.

It doesn't strike me as particularly fair that some people in this thread are saying they ordered 20+ tickets for groups of for friends.

Other ticket agents for other big festivals manage to give you an actual queue number and an estimate of how long it will be before your order is processed. Why is Glastonbury T-day always so stressful and unpredictable.

[eFestivals]

I think your wrong there, We all had

"http://www2.seetickets.com/g2011"

&

"http://www2.seetickets.com/g2011/regform.asp?orig=uk&method=DEPOSIT"

on our tool bars (so we could just middle click to open in a new tab), pretty much 99% of the time when I clicked it opened the queue page, in both Firefox & IE BUT the kids always timed out.

There is no way that was random, well over 500+ clicks each and only me got a page (and basically every time).

I assumed they were using some sort of token system, that you got when you first got the queuing page, which let you get it again and again.

Im not saying it wasnt fair or anything, just a bit puzzled to how it worked

especially since I could get on with both FF & IE, which sort of disproves the token theory, I think

Yes, it's random. That means some people randomly get the page, and others randomly never do.

A webserver can only pick up one incoming connection 'randomly' while not picking up another.

(I've put 'randomly' in quotes because it's not entirely random - it's your incoming request hitting the server at the exact moment it has the resources to deal with your request, so the only real random factor is the timing of other people's requests against yours, causing the webserver to act [or not, when too busy] on those incoming requests).

[eFestivals]

Absolute shambles of a system. I would have quite happily sat in a queue given the chance ; but I sat at my machine for 4.5 hours without a sniff of even getting into the queue.

It doesn't strike me as particularly fair that some people in this thread are saying they ordered 20+ tickets for groups of for friends.

Other ticket agents for other big festivals manage to give you an actual queue number and an estimate of how long it will be before your order is processed. Why is Glastonbury T-day always so stressful and unpredictable.

the costs of a system that could queue up perhaps a million incoming requests at exactly 9am is waaaaaay beyond what any ticket agent will ever have.

[Kemmel]

Awful system

[Pinhead]

Convinced there was a connection bias towards incoming 3G networks though, whether through route or server resource. This would be straight forward to set-up - I have seen similar systems in operation.

[Guest blackcockerel]

Anyone know why it wouldn't let me book 6 or 7 in one go? It said some of the reg numbers were wrong when they weren't. When I broke it down to an order of four and an order of three it worked fine

[Clareno7]

I'm constantly amazed at the 'knock See tickets' comments for their syatems that make us q to get tickets.

There are 135,000 tix for sale and almost certainly more people than that wanting a ticket.

Do you expect See to set up a system that can sell 135,000 immediately - at 9.00 on the button - to the first 135,000 people that are randomly lucky enough to get through first??

I think a system that appears to be selling 34,000 tix per hour - thats around 5,700 per minute - is coping pretty darn well.

[MoonBuggy]

the costs of a system that could queue up perhaps a million incoming requests at exactly 9am is waaaaaay beyond what any ticket agent will ever have.

[MrZigster]

I'm constantly amazed at the 'knock See tickets' comments for their syatems that make us q to get tickets.

[Liam_G]

I don't like to disagree - I know you put in a huge amount of effort keeping this site running under the load, so you have much more experience than most - but I didn't just pull the 'couple of thousand' figure in my previous post from thin air. Admittedly the few comments I made on the subject last night might have sounded a bit irritable, so sorry about that, but I stand by the spirit of what I said.

Firstly, server cost: a million concurrent users is a lot, but there's plenty of precedent in dealing with that kind of load; this site has some good examples to work from - I know it's impossible to make a proper comparison, all situations are different, but they have sites handling a good bit over 10,000 concurrent users per server on software much more complex than a simple queue/purchase system. Let's be pessimistic, and go for one third that, to allow plenty of room for scaling problems: that's 300 servers needed for about six hours (to give some leeway either side). From EC2 that'll cost you around $1250 for the most powerful nodes. That's under £850 in server costs, and I was being very generous with the numbers.

Secondly, and more importantly, software setup: the problem is entirely parallelisable, and load balancing an proper queue system to pass people through to the section of the cluster handling transactions would be straightforward with existing open source software. I'm sure SeeTickets has a few IT guys on staff who are up to their eyeballs in work every time the big sales come around anyway, so having them work on this a few months beforehand would probably save money, if anything. This is also a one-off cost: whatever they do pay in initial software setup will amortize every year that the system's used - that means fewer crashes, less time and money spent sorting out the overloaded servers, and more profit in the long run.

Any comments? I'd be especially interested if there's anyone from SeeTickets reading this - I think it's genuinely workable, and I've spent the last couple of years wondering why they can't handle the load even when they know it's coming.

[sonicpurveyor]

Anyone know why it wouldn't let me book 6 or 7 in one go? It said some of the reg numbers were wrong when they weren't. When I broke it down to an order of four and an order of three it worked fine

[joe_bee]

I don't like to disagree - I know you put in a huge amount of effort keeping this site running under the load, so you have much more experience than most - but I didn't just pull the 'couple of thousand' figure in my previous post from thin air. Admittedly the few comments I made on the subject last night might have sounded a bit irritable, so sorry about that, but I stand by the spirit of what I said.

Firstly, server cost: a million concurrent users is a lot, but there's plenty of precedent in dealing with that kind of load; this site has some good examples to work from - I know it's impossible to make a proper comparison, all situations are different, but they have sites handling a good bit over 10,000 concurrent users per server on software much more complex than a simple queue/purchase system. Let's be pessimistic, and go for one third that, to allow plenty of room for scaling problems: that's 300 servers needed for about six hours (to give some leeway either side). From EC2 that'll cost you around $1250 for the most powerful nodes. That's under £850 in server costs, and I was being very generous with the numbers.

Secondly, and more importantly, software setup: the problem is entirely parallelisable, and load balancing an proper queue system to pass people through to the section of the cluster handling transactions would be straightforward with existing open source software. I'm sure SeeTickets has a few IT guys on staff who are up to their eyeballs in work every time the big sales come around anyway, so having them work on this a few months beforehand would probably save money, if anything. This is also a one-off cost: whatever they do pay in initial software setup will amortize every year that the system's used - that means fewer crashes, less time and money spent sorting out the overloaded servers, and more profit in the long run.

Any comments? I'd be especially interested if there's anyone from SeeTickets reading this - I think it's genuinely workable, and I've spent the last couple of years wondering why they can't handle the load even when they know it's coming.

[sonicpurveyor]

I dunno why people keep knocking Glasto Fests / See Tickets for their own inability to get tickets. Look no matter what whether it's tickets for Glasto, a world cup final, a job, whatever, if YOU want something that bad you'll move heaven and earth to find a way to get whatever you want. That's how I've always approached anything in life.

Glasto for example, I made sure that myself and all my mates worked together to help each other out, made sure we'd all checked our registrations & post codes to avoid mishaps, made sure we all were using debit cards and there were funds in accounts, simple things I know but sometimes the little things trip you up. Even ensuring mobiles fully charged with charger by side in case, and the most important of all a full flask or coffee on the side......I was on net with a few browser tabs open letting the net refresh automatically, whilst also redialing on my mobile & landline. By 9.05 the web had done its magic & i was on a booking form - the auto refresh worked! (i use firefox btw) so booked my 3 tickets & email confirmation through by 9.12.

But we'd all agreed to help each other out so took advantage of having a few booking pages still open & used them for mates. However they did time out eventually and i started the process off again. I was sat at my pc from 8.30 till 1.15 ish when tix sold out attempting to get booking pages available (so did my mates mind) in order to help each other out. As it happens I was the only one of of them all to even get a booking page so I made all the bookings myself. I won't say how many were booked but I think we'll enjoy it that much more knowing there's gonna be a load of us there.

But its down to commitment, making sure everything is in place & having the determination not to fail - don't blame others look at what you could have done different to help yourself!

[eFestivals]

What people need to remember about ticket agents compared to other retail businesses is that greater demand does not come along with greater profits.

If they have 100,000 tickets to sell, their profit is the same whether 100,000 people come to buy them or 10,000,000 come to buy them.

So on that basis, there is no point in them investing in massive systems to cope with the higher numbers. They can have smaller systems and will still sell all of the tickets without problems. And so that is what they do, and that is what they'll always do.

[The Nal]

This was great yesterday.

Especially the "credit cards will not be accepted for UK sales". So then I used my debit card and got this, twice.

Edited October 5, 2010 by The Nal