Slashdot Mirror
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."
I just want to die.
http://www.denverpost.com/ci_7248448
Rockies spokesperson:
"We are as frustrated and disappointed as (fans) are," Alves said.
He said the servers were overwhelmed this morning and that officials had no idea that so many people would try the website.
Yeah, who could have seen 30,000,000 people trying to buy tickets to the championship series of the only baseball team for nearly 1000 miles in any direction? Boston fans certainly wouldn't want those tickets either.
They didn't put anything on their site for hours to let people know there had been a crash. Just a series of timeout errors.
My mom says I'm cool.
Seriously, when they made the announcement, we were like, are they kidding? They talked about how they could handle it. Lines opened at 10 am, at10:00:12, you couldn't access the site. I think they said they had sold about 400 tickets before the server exploded? Wow. First world series Colorado has ever seen. Thanks for making us look like assholes.
...a pair of helicopters has been hovering over Fenway for the last few hours, I'm guessing to monitor the real world analog of a "system meltdown".
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
They should have used Bittorrent. Somehow.
...OS were the servers running?
OK, the servers are supposed to melt down after the post on Slashdot.
This sig no verb.
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.
The ticket scalpers that have 4+ cable modems and a lot of pcs overloaded the system.
Finally, a troll I can agree with. Well said, sir.
That's exactly what I was thinking. Looks like a game to get into, but it might be too late.
Steve's Computer Service, Hobbs, NM
Sports generally are tolerable or even interesting in person, whereas on TV I find them annoying to watch no matter how comfortable you are.
The situation is exactly inverse to movies where almost anything I prefer to watch at home now.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
What's the address for the ticket vendor? A nice Slashdotting or two should give them enough data to help discover the limitations of their server.
More seriously, sounds like real demand. I know I'd love to see one of these games if I lived near Denver -- even if a it is a few hundred dollars. Teams don't get to the World Series that often unless they're NY.
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.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Speaking of overload, in 2004, for the Cardinals/Red Sox series, I slept outside Busch Stadium with homeless people hired by the scalpers in 39 degree temperatures (I know, I know, up hill... both ways) and the only things that got overloaded there were the porta-potties.
In 2006 for the Cardinals/Tigers World Series, they opted for the online lottery method. Somehow, I still felt shit on.
Other than this text, there is no discernible information contained in this sig.
Boo! Hiss!
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
Paciolan, Inc., a leading provider of online ticketing technology, has chosen IBM eServer(TM) p650 systems to increase ticket sale processing speed. Following completion of a thorough benchmark analysis, IBM has projected that Paciolan's clients will have the ability to process more than 100,000 tickets per hour.
Channel 4 (CBS) in Denver has also had this to say: The Rockies did say it was blocking some IP addresses due to suspicious or malicious activity.
100,000 tickets per hour is about 28 tickets per second. I'd imagine they got tens of thousands of hits in the first few seconds after they opened the sale.
Is this some slashdot meme? Isn't Chess or Quake a sport anyway?
I wonder if you could rent part of the storm worm to buy up tickets for you.
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?
wasn't this 100% predicted in the MLB article the said this was how they were going to sell it? I guess they didn't realize a lot of people had sick days to use in case they actually got a ticket.
.. is to sell the tickets for their actual market value, removing the incentive to scalp.
If you disagree with me on social issues, then it's pretty clear that you are a narrow-minded bigot.
... will welcome our new Ticket Server Overload!
If you disagree with me on social issues, then it's pretty clear that you are a narrow-minded bigot.
Denver 9 news reports 8.5 million hits in the first 90 minutes. To make it simpler for the ones too lazy to do the math, that's 1574 hits a second.. Probably worse than any DOS attack they thought could happen.... They obviously failed to do proper availability and capacity management and deserve what they got. Hope the MLB and the Rockies sick it too them.
Imagine what it might be like if they held a World Series and invited the rest of the World!
If you only have a certain number of tickets and all of them are going to be sold then what is the point in spending a big slice of additional money just to sell them a little bit faster? It'll only mean less profit.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
ya think there might be a reason why Ticketmaster charges those fees??
They're now claiming that there was a malicious attack on the site, and sales will resume later. So, millions of computers attempted to connect to Paciolan's servers and that brought them down? I suppose it is possible that some type of DOS was launched to disrupt the sale, but I think it's also possible that a million people or so wanted to buy 60,000 available tickets.
So was it a DOS or not? Who's got the skinny?
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.
:/) 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= ), 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...
;) 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...
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
In any case, the Rockies are new at this
appleguru.org
If they only sell online, and the servers are crashed, how will they attempt to explain how the scalpers have so many tickets to sell? "tee hee we have NO idea how those thousands of tickets got into their hands tee hee"
That's no big deal. Try to buy Hannah Montana tickets...
...a nice model M for that good rant....it's like typing can become a contact sport, fun! I love freaking out folks at the library with my high contact, who cares about typos method. Sounds like a harley at low revs with a bad valve...
World Series? What other countries of the world are participating? :)
from a golf player?
I have to wonder if the massive rush couldn't have also been exacerbated by, say, lots of scalpers with computer programs set to flood the system and purchase as many tickets as possible on the very moment they became available.
Libertarians somehow believe that private businesses should be stronger than governments but weaker than individuals.
Stupid baseball.
Not only does it take up ridiculous amounts of time on Sportscenter that would be better served by talking about Football... now it has to ruin my weekend trip to Denver!
I bought ballet tickets in Denver for my wife's birthday a couple of months ago, not recognizing that the world series might be in town the very same weekend... luckily I had enough forethought to also book the hotel room at the same time... or we'd be screwed right now! It's going to be an absolute zoo in downtown Denver this weekend.... here's to $30 a day parking!
stupid baseball.... grumble... grumble....
Friedmud
hmm. lets think about this. professional baseball team. best season record in their history, best chance of winning the biggest prize in baseball(whatever it is) that they've ever had, and tickets only being sold online. yeah, they thought that one through.
To live without killing is a thought which could electrify the world, if men were capable of staying awake long enough.
Not only that, they didn't even properly configure apache on the servers. They are all sitting wide open on the backend:
http://ev12.evenue.net/
I got there from a GOOGLE search.
On an Ironic note, my image/word to type in is "decency".
(1) Park in free light rail parking [ Broadway station, Alameda station ] and light rail takes you one block from ballet theater [ convention center stop ].
(2) Park on east side of downtown. Baseball and football stadiums are are the west and north. (Yes, the Sunday football game is the same time as the 4th world series game.). Take 16th street shuttle to near ballet theater. I used this method to hear Carl Bernstein presentation of his new book four blocks from when the final pennent game was happening.
Try getting high demand tickets through TicketMaster.com sometime. You would think the biggest player in the industry could handle the volume that's entirely predictable. But no. Every single time there's a high demand event sold through TicketBastard its servers bog down to a crawl during the first 30 minutes or so after the tickets go on sale.
In Soviet Russia, I ruled you
If you can agree with a troll, then he's not doing his job.
As opposed to USian football where sheeple sit to watch a boring game with grown fucktarded men carrying a little ball while running back and forth on the grass, tennis where people sit to watch two or four grown fucktarded sheeple hit the fucking ball back and forth, football/USian soccer where sheeple a bunch of grown fucktards kick the fucking ball in both directions, or the fucktarded Canadian sport called hockey where sheeple watch a bunch of grown fucktarded men use a fucking stick to hit a fucking puck?
All sports suck and fucktards like you and the fucktards who watch them and play them should go earn themselves a fucking Darwin Award.
As opposed to USian football where sheeple sit to watch a boring game with grown fucktarded men carrying a little ball while running back and forth on the grass, tennis where people sit to watch two or four grown fucktarded sheeple hit the fucking ball back and forth, football/USian soccer where sheeple a bunch of grown fucktards kick the fucking ball in both directions, or the fucktarded Canadian sport called hockey where sheeple watch a bunch of grown fucktarded men use a fucking stick to hit a fucking puck?
All sports suck and fucktards like you and the fucktards who watch them and play them should go earn themselves a fucking Darwin Award.
As opposed to USian football where sheeple sit to watch a boring game with grown fucktarded men carrying a little ball while running back and forth on the grass, tennis where people sit to watch two or four grown fucktarded sheeple hit the fucking ball back and forth, football/USian soccer where sheeple a bunch of grown fucktards kick the fucking ball in both directions, or the fucktarded Canadian sport called hockey where sheeple watch a bunch of grown fucktarded men use a fucking stick to hit a fucking puck?
All sports suck and fucktards like you and the fucktards who watch them and play them should go earn themselves a fucking Darwin Award.
As opposed to USian football where sheeple sit to watch a boring game with grown fucktarded men carrying a little ball while running back and forth on the grass, tennis where people sit to watch two or four grown fucktarded sheeple hit the fucking ball back and forth, football/USian soccer where sheeple a bunch of grown fucktards kick the fucking ball in both directions, or the fucktarded Canadian sport called hockey where sheeple watch a bunch of grown fuck
Yes, I agree that all professional sports suck. Pretty much all collegiate sports that I can think of, too. Maybe if they involved a greater risk of death for the enormous compensation and adoration they receive . . . (I say this as a former jock).
What any of this has to do with "USian football".
None of this detracts, however, from the fact that you're a complete fucking moron.