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."
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.
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.
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.