I was just feeling snarky, and it’s the Pit. Nothing personal.
It’s completely understandable when you look at the economics. Stop thinking of Ticketmaster’s website as being insufficient for the traffic they get, and realize that it’s plenty for the business they do. They’re in the business of selling tickets. And they managed to sell all of their tickets in just a few minutes. That’s a success for them. Why would they spend a bunch of money to upgrade their servers?
The problem (for people who want to buy tickets) is that there isn’t enough server capacity to handle all the people who want tickets (most of whom wont get any). But I claim that, while adding server capacity might help them serve pages to those extra people, it wouldn’t actually cause more Pearl Jam tickets to exist, so you’d have the same dissatisfaction at not getting tickets.
It’s probably true that you would have gotten tickets if you’d gotten the server to load, but it’s not actually relevant to whether you would have gotten tickets if they had better servers. That’s a bit counterintuitive, but it should be explained by this example:
Lets say that there are 500 tickets to an event, 10,000 people who want to buy them, and ticketmaster’s servers can handle only 100 connections at once (when their hamster is feeling plucky). For the sake of simplicity, let’s assume that each person is only going to buy 1 ticket. So, at the appointed time, 10,000 people hit refresh, and the lucky/daring/bots among them manage to get one of the 100 slots that Ticketmaster’s server can handle. If it takes an average of 2 minutes to complete an order, then the whole show will be sold out in about 10 minutes, as slots are gradually released and the 9,000+ people who are still trying to get tickets get lucky, send that web request at just the right moment, and get a slot. Result: 9,500 people who think: I hate Ticketmaster! If only they built better webservers, then I could have logged in sometime during those 10 minutes!
Now, for the next show, Ticketmaster is serious about upgrading. They increase their server capacity by a factor of 100. Now, at the appointed time, 10,000 people log in and they all get a nice responsive web page. Of course, there are still only 500 tickets, so it’s the lucky 500 people who first take whatever action is is that makes Ticketmaster reserve a set of tickets for you for the duration that end up with them. Oh, there might be a few whose telephone poles are struck by lightning, or who can’t find their credit card in time, or who pass away and allow the session to time out, meaning that a few of the tickets are available for the 9,500 people who are hitting refresh in a vain attempt to get tickets. But, for all intents and purposes, the show is sold out in 2 minutes. It’s effectively sold out in the second or two that the first 500 people manage to get the system to reserve them tickets. Result: 9,500 (less any deceased ones) people who think: I hate Ticketmaster! I logged in right at the right time, and there was nothing available!
The problem, in both cases, is that the number of people who want to buy tickets is vastly greater than the number of tickets. This is not a problem that can be solved with server technology. It’s a problem that can be solved with more effective pricing. It’s a problem that’s actually made worse by pricing the tickets so low, because that gives scalpers an incentive to try to snag as many tickets as possible.
