Friday, June 27, 2008

A ticket for Madonna

Try to get a ticket online for Madonna's next concert in Athens from http://www.ticketpro.gr/ and you'll see something like:

Server under heavy load
Server under heavy load. Please try again later
Thank you for understanding


The .asp application backing up the website cannot obviously cope with the load of (I can guess) thousands of users trying to get hold of a ticket.

It's nice to collect huge commissions on the tickets sold (even an unbelievable 10% overcharge for those unlucky that want to pay with a credit card), but when it comes to investing in technology and know-how, those guys just don't get it.

Somebody should tell them about 3-tier architectures, caching techniques, load-balancing, load testing, clustering, etc. Moving to Java and an opensource platform could help, as well.

I could only laugh while reading how Betfair are able to handle 1 million transactions per second with a mix of proprietary and opensource solutions, that includes JBoss and Linux on top of commodity x86 hardware. Not exactly the same market sector but the technology is similar.

So do you want a ticket for Madonna? Better go stand in the queue!

2 comments:

graffic said...

Moving to opensource without prior knowledge about "how a webpage works" its not gonna help them.

The're many languages and technologies, open and closed. You can use the best, but if you don't care to know how they work... not much can be done.

Dimitris Andreadis said...

Of course, opensource is not the cure if you don't know how to use the technology & tools at hand.

However, it's the opensource culture and philosophy that helps people give more emphasis on "their" own know-how, rather than on spending money on tools and licenses.