Give seetickets a break

[marcbyers]

They still sold the full allocation of tickets so don't know why everyone is having such a go, there were more people wanting tickets than available so people were always going to be disappointed. They sold the tickets in record time.

[Cooter]

Well I've not got tickets, I'm gutted more than words, but what's the point in having a go at SEE when they haven't got enough tickets to sell to everyone that wants one.

[blackchopper]

Well theres 120000 people who think see tickets are great but the rest of us think see tickets are crap !

[wirralchris]

Well theres 120000 people who think see tickets are great but the rest of us think see tickets are crap !

[grumpyhack]

I can't think of any on-line / phone booking system in the UK that could have handled the demand any better. I say that as someone who failed to get through - though luckily another in our group managed to get us all tickets.

[FestiveSteve]

Wish it'd taken 4 hours to sell out, maybe longer. Comes down to dedication then rather than a lottery, which it would be if people only needed to invest 30 mins to trying before they sold out

[airwaves]

Reality check

1 X thousand want tickets where X >>>120 (tickets available).

Result X - 120 thousand disappointed / upset / angry people

This will be the same whoever / however the tickets are sold

2 - Possible blocked ISP - Get a grip. USA is the home for conspiricy theories

3 - The system was crap particularly in the first 30 minutes. Yes, and so it was for all of us. No advantage or disadvantage for anyone.

4 - Townies have a better chance of getting through. C*** - I live in deepest Devon with a normal broadband - not fibre. Got connected and transaction complete at around 9:40

5 - Got to payment page and then it froze / refused / ... Yes this should not happen. Hard to say though whether any other seller would have the same problem when processing 3000 tickets per minute.

I'm pleased for those 120000 lucky people with tickets - self included of course. And my commiserations to those who were less fortunate. But stop lucking for scrapegoats - it's mostly down to luck, not circumstances

[alanc]

Well theres 120000 people who think see tickets are great but the rest of us think see tickets are crap !

[dan05delaney]

See are shite but the system they use is miles better than any other ticket site, unless you had a dedicated server farm no website could handle that many requests... but when you are selling 5000 tickets a minuite thats some damn good going

[Yesiamaduck]

They processed 120,000 orders in just over an hour, I dont think any other Ticketing agent in the world could've done that.

The fact it was done in just one hour as opposed to sayyy four tells me that the Seetickets service was a lot more robust this time around.

[Guest]

4 - Townies have a better chance of getting through. C*** - I live in deepest Devon with a normal broadband - not fibre. Got connected and transaction complete at around 9:40

[frostypaw]

Wish it'd taken 4 hours to sell out, maybe longer. Comes down to dedication then rather than a lottery, which it would be if people only needed to invest 30 mins to trying before they sold out

[Keef]

Another thing that crossed my mind that might give the rural dweller an advantage is contention ratio. ISPs provide home users with a connection with a contention ratio of *up to* 50:1. I don't know so much about this but could someone in a rural area actually have a much lower contention ratio merely by there being fewer homes? Anyone know how this side of things work? Living in suburbia I definitely notice a drop in performance early-mid evening and other high usage times, and I'm on fibre - I presume this has something to do with contention ratio?

[Penrhos]

I work for a major retailer and yes Seetickets managed to sell 120,000 tickets in 90 minutes (actually just over an hour when you take off the downtime) but it was still a piss-poor performance.

A) get a set of Cisco NetScaler's and offload the holding page & turn on surge protection to protect the front-end so it doesn't go bang when the sale is turned on.

Turn on persistence even if you have to use session cookies to do it then users won't loose the session once there in - there is nothing worse than filling in the form pressing "Proceed" and dropping the lot.

We can take over £1,000,000 per minute at peak sales and don't have these problems....

Don't forget at 6 tickets per order that's only 20,000 orders min and probably only 40,000 max.

Selling 2000 tickets per minute is not a huge number if they are being ordered in batches.

It would be interesting to find out what the number of concurrent sessions they managed to support & how many sessions were trying to connect.

If see came back and said they had over 1,000,000 sessions hammering the front-end then I might cut them a bit of slack but at the moment I'd score them at 4 out of 10 for effort.

[marketsqhero]

They processed 120,000 orders in just over an hour, I dont think any other Ticketing agent in the world could've done that.

The fact it was done in just one hour as opposed to sayyy four tells me that the Seetickets service was a lot more robust this time around.

[frostypaw]

Did you not read any of the crazy shit people were trying? Four to twenty browsers and windows... It was easily a million hits in those first few seconds

How could it be worth the expense of ensuring it runs smoothly when it's a one a year thing, not daily business like at your place

Think before criticism

[marketsqhero]

I ain't criticising, just pointing out that it's not as massive an amount as people make out (if you read what I quoted that was the gist of my post, it's not a world beating record).

Personally I don't expect them to supply kit that can cope with a 2 hour surge per year, and they obviously don't have the kit otherwise they would be able to handle it, but that's not a criticism, just a fact.

[Newtoit]

I dont think glasto wants it to sell ot faster though!!!!

See tickets can be rubbish, but whoever the alternatives are would get just as much bashing!

Too quick to sell out - 'it's only IT geeks' who have the know how to get through can get tickets...

Too slow to sell out - See tickets have c@cked up

As long as there are too many people wanting to go, there will be upset people.

[Englishdragon]

I work for a major retailer and yes Seetickets managed to sell 120,000 tickets in 90 minutes (actually just over an hour when you take off the downtime) but it was still a piss-poor performance.

A) get a set of Cisco NetScaler's and offload the holding page & turn on surge protection to protect the front-end so it doesn't go bang when the sale is turned on.

Turn on persistence even if you have to use session cookies to do it then users won't loose the session once there in - there is nothing worse than filling in the form pressing "Proceed" and dropping the lot.

We can take over £1,000,000 per minute at peak sales and don't have these problems....

Don't forget at 6 tickets per order that's only 20,000 orders min and probably only 40,000 max.

Selling 2000 tickets per minute is not a huge number if they are being ordered in batches.

It would be interesting to find out what the number of concurrent sessions they managed to support & how many sessions were trying to connect.

If see came back and said they had over 1,000,000 sessions hammering the front-end then I might cut them a bit of slack but at the moment I'd score them at 4 out of 10 for effort.

[Englishdragon]

120,000 in 90 minutes isn't that big a deal. Think of how many night some bands put on at the likes of Wembley (70,000) and sell out in under an hour. Think Take That sold 500,000 in less than an hour, granted it wasn't just one agency but it's not a massive amount really.

Lets say people were maxing their 6 per order, that's potentially 20,000 transactions in 90 minutes or 222 per minute or 3 a second. I tune web servers that handle 30-40 transactions a second.

[dan05delaney]

120,000 in 90 minutes isn't that big a deal. Think of how many night some bands put on at the likes of Wembley (70,000) and sell out in under an hour. Think Take That sold 500,000 in less than an hour, granted it wasn't just one agency but it's not a massive amount really.

Lets say people were maxing their 6 per order, that's potentially 20,000 transactions in 90 minutes or 222 per minute or 3 a second. I tune web servers that handle 30-40 transactions a second.

[stuartbert two hats]

I have to say, I'm surprised that things haven't improved significantly in recent years, with the emergence of cloud providers such as AWS and Azure being able to offer huge amounts of capacity for situations just like this. No need to have all the kit on standby, just light the servers up when needed and spin then down once sold out.

It seems like such a no brainer to me that I must be missing something. Is this already happening and if so, why are there still so many timeouts when entering details?

Anyone know more about the situation?

[efcfanwirral]

Ok so all those complaining....do you want them to go in 5 minutes? At least you have a fighting chance now when it takes longer, it may as well be an all names in the hat lottery if they 'fix' it and the majority will see nothing more than a 'sold out' page. One shot, maybe two, that's it.

Currently you have over an hour worth of shots.

[Penrhos]

Even if the front-end is being hammered there is no excuse for the back-end being so flaky.

If you get to the page where you key in your registration details & click proceed it should work not drop your connection and dump you back in the queue (unless you're lucky and manage to refresh it quick enough).

I got this twice and only the third attempt did I manage to get all the way through - with about 10 minutes to spare.

Only bonus was I was able to loop round again once the first order had gone through and get more tickets.

[johnmcga]

Am I the only one who thinks a much bigger factor here is the size of groups people manage to get together?

Me and my girlfriend were after tickets this year and managed to join up with a group of six friends who were all trying, plus another couple.

Of the ten of us trying, only two people even saw the form where you put your registration numbers in (thankfully they were able to sort tickets for all of us).

While I know See Tickets take flack every year, I can't help thinking the system is pretty weighted against people buying tickets either as individuals, or as a couple

It's a fine balance as I know people want to go with all their friends, but I'd be interested to know what proportion of people who weren't successful also weren't part of a large group.