Tickets.com internet meltdown

Tickets.com was the online sales agent for World Series tickets, and they went on sale yesterday at 10AM Pacific time. I started doing a Ping Plotter graph just before onsale time, and it showed nearly unreachable servers for two hours: I never got a single TCP "connect" the whole time from my browser.

I graphed this for several hours, showing both the web server reachability and that of one of the data center routers to show that IDC bandwidth was not the issue. (click for a fullsize image)

What was particularly irritating to many fans was that they were able to "lock" their tickets but could not complete their transactions. My guess is that all incoming requests were funneled through the same pipe and firewall and servers, so if you had a (say) 1% chance of getting a web server connection on any given try, getting the three or four connections required to complete a transaction would have been like winning the lottery.

I have never run a large web server, so I speak only from speculation here, but it seems to me that in order to do this properly, one needs two pipes. The great unwashed throng goes through the main site, all fighting to get through the door, but once you get a connection and are able to "lock" your seats, the next transaction is redirected to a different server that goes down a different pipe (even though it may very well be served out of the same data center cage).

This way, once you get inside the ropes, your packets are not competing with the thundering herds of visitors. Since the actual transactions would not likely be that bandwidth-intensive, a much smaller pipe could be used for this part of the conversation. Some kind of token or cookie would be used to prevent people from going directly to the transaction servers.

I hope tickets.com gets a handle on this.

Kasia mentioned some of this in her weblog, but the info I've posted is entirely of my own research.

Posted by Steve at October 17, 2002 09:25 AM | TrackBack