It’s Looking Like Another SNAFU

[Update: Scribe has written a story about the SNAFU at SFBG. Comment from Marian: "it's moving slowly, but we've seen worse!" They had to add more servers...ummm, is no one capable of capacity planning? They are selling $15.2 million of tickets right now (plus handling fees), maybe they could stretch for another server or two...or, use Amazon's cloud like everybody else does who wants scalability and reliability...]

I got into the ticket system 12 seconds after Noon – and got 2 tickets, in about 8 minutes. One friend must’ve beat me, he got his tickets in 3 minutes. Someone else who got on at 12:00:12 also got tickets. Lucky us. Unfortunate for the people who were 20 seconds or more late to connect to the servers…the horror stories are starting to come in. I have a couple of friends who are still holding now, after hours. Good luck to everyone in the queue!

First, a tip – thanks to Burner Barefoottrout:

“if you get the “tried too many times error” use another browser application. I got booted 3 times on chrome and now I’m using firefox where I’ve had no boots but have been waiting patiently for 2 hours.”

Another tip, from @BurningMan on Twitter:

If you’re having passcode trouble getting into the queue, try clearing your cookies & cache.

Here’s a sampling of what Burners are going through, from our web site and comments to this blog:

Burner James:

Got in the queue at 12:00:21 and got kicked out (frozen) at 12:16 and have been getting frozen out repeatedly since then. Frustrating.

Burner Sylvia:

got in at 34 seconds and have since been booted out 4 times, still waiting…oh, make that 5 now.!

Burner Elizabeth:

got in queue at 12:00:27 and have been kicked off twice with error messages

Burner Tat-Dat

Burner Robert Burns:

Burner Matt:

Kicked off 8 times, loged on 12:00:15 still no ticket at 1:16…fml

Burner Alexey:

Poor experience. Got to checkout page, but it gave me some “session timed out” on final checkout. 2nd time – same thing. 3rd time it worked. Trying to purchase tix for friend who had unmovable meeting – got to checkout page, entered all the info, got generic “something went wrong”. Had to start from beginning, worried he won’t get his tickets.

Burner Chris:

At 12:00 after inputing my code it went to a page saying please stand by that was at 12 noon finaly I refreshed at 2:15 and now it says that I am in the Queue. This system sucks

Burner Nillabear:

Got in the sale about 30 seconds after it started. Got my ticket after two hours. Had to refresh about three times due to disconnect error but I’m guessing I kept my place in line. Good luck peoples! See you back home.

Burner Niki:

Whew! Three hours and I got mine!

Burner Jan:

Do you think we are really in the queue still. 4 hours now.

Burner Eric:

If you have the ear of anyone at the burningman ticketing staff, here’s what i’d like to share since they appear to have all of their comment area on lock-down right now.

So last year i spent 5 minutes deciding how much money i was willing to spend on tickets, and clicked go… then a few weeks later i found out if i got tickets or not and i did.  And i got tickets.

This year i had to register, then i had to login at noon PST, then i tried various times in the day to buy tickets with my registration number (becuase i could not sit in front of the computer for hours)… the first time i logged in at 12:00:47 and before i left the house i got booted from the system and it appears i lost my place in line.  There appeared to be no actual system for determining if i had kept my place in line… in the end, i wasted plenty of time, got no tickets, and go no reasurance that my place in line had or hadn’t been lost (which is just plane stupid not to give that feedback if it’s communicated to be a major point of the system) and so despite having been logged in only 47 seconds after the start i got no tickets trying throughout the day.  THIS BLOW DONKEY BALLS!

We could go on, but I think you get the gist. If you got into the queue in the first 30 seconds, you were cool. Any later, good luck! Try a different browser, try closing your browser down completely and logging on again.

Or…try picking up one of the 118+ tickets already on sale on Stubhub, starting at $624. So much for the legal contract – or maybe these scalper tickets are all from the pre-Christmas draw.

After 25 years of partying, and hundreds of millions of dollars…we still can’t sell 40,000 tickets on a web site. How complicated is this? In the past I’ve been involved in projects where, in a few months, we built systems that can process 200+ database transactions per second. The architecture was not particularly complex or expensive – many others face this problem. Here’s how you can use free, Open Source software to process 200,000 transactions per second.