The massive traffic that hit Computicket’s website

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The massive traffic that hit Computicket’s website

Ed Sheeran fans took to Twitter last week to criticise Computicket, following its website appearing to fall over under demand for concert tickets.

The platform opened ticket sales for Sheeran’s concert in Cape Town on 28 June 2018, and suffered downtime when users attempted to use its services.
 
On Thursday, however, the standard online platform – online.computicket.com – experienced a problem, due to an unexpected increase in traffic on its site
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They didn't expect an increase in traffic ? :twisted:
 
How is this a new thing? Do Ed Sheeran fans think that anything will change just because they took to Twitter?
 
So basically they got DoS'ed by their own customers?



:crylaugh:
 
6,000 requests per minute and they could not handle that?

Amateurs
 
The explanations are the same rhetoric each and every time. BEP, U2, Linkin Park, etc etc, it happens every time.
 
They probably have a potato for a server... I would not call that amount of traffic "massive", just piss poor planning and not investing enough money and time into proper infrastructure, surely they should have some sort of load-balancing in place?, and not after ticket sales has gone live....

Here's a rare look at their main server: :p

potatoserver.PNG
 
I think may people don't realize that the problem that Computicket faces is actually not something that is solved anywhere in the world.

From a programming/logic perspective, the problem of calculating the available seats and combinations of block sizes, etc. in real time is a non-trivial one.

If you remember that story about the Chinese farmer who asks for one grain of rice for each block on a chessboard then you'll have a high level idea of what the problem is.

I have worked on similar problems in booking and travel, it gets gnarly as all hell very fast once you start to see the size of the problem from a logical perspective.

I know it's easy to hate on SA and SA companies but on this one, I totally get it.
 
SlinkyMike said:
I think may people don't realize that the problem that Computicket faces is actually not something that is solved anywhere in the world.

From a programming/logic perspective, the problem of calculating the available seats and combinations of block sizes, etc. in real time is a non-trivial one.

If you remember that story about the Chinese farmer who asks for one grain of rice for each block on a chessboard then you'll have a high level idea of what the problem is.

I have worked on similar problems in booking and travel, it gets gnarly as all hell very fast once you start to see the size of the problem from a logical perspective.

I know it's easy to hate on SA and SA companies but on this one, I totally get it.
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But then the question is, was the seat selection the problem, or did the website buckle before it even got to that part?
From where I stand, it just looks like the website is not architected toward scaling, and lets be honest, nowadays you can prewarm your clusters and you can scale up before opening ticket sales like they did.

To be honest, the article didn't really go into depth about which part was under too much strain. Also, if the seat selection is really the problem, there is always the virtual queue that Takealot did with blackfriday.
 
https://www.blazemeter.com/blog/tes...glastonbury-and-improve-your-site-performance

Test in Formation - How to Avoid Website Crashes Like Glastonbury and Improve Your Site Performance

Music fans who were hoping to dance to the tunes of Beyonce, Radiohead and Lady Gaga (according to rumours) at the 2017 Glastonbury Music were in for a disappointment.

Not only did all tickets sell out in 50 minutes, but the ticket website and the official website (the only way to order tickets) couldn’t handle the load and both crashed. The unavailable service due to high levels of traffic left many music lovers unable to connect to the site, or unable to complete their transaction, rendering them ticketless and without access to hearing their favorite melodies live.
Click to expand...
 
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