Now that the dust has settled, it seems as though the ticket program is running smoothly again. There are still seats available at the $36.00 level. Tickets will be on sale until Sunday, April 28th or until they run out.
We thought it would be a good idea just to fill you all in on what exactly happened yesterday.
As you probably know, tickets went on sale for MELTDOWN yesterday here on BowieNet. Among all the frenzy to get tickets, you Bnetters managed to put quite an intense pounding on the MusicToday Ticketing System. The traffic was so high at one point that you managed to MELTDOWN the server taking the orders. The shopping cart engine could not handle the frantic tenacity of repeated additions/subtractions of tickets from the carts. It just couldn’t create cookies fast enough.
This is the reason many of you saw the ODBC error or that your cart was empty even after you had selected tickets.
There was also another problem with a “no tickets available” error message. The explanation here is more of a mathematical one.
For one reason or another, users were closing their browsers in the middle of the purchasing process (Probably due to receiving one of the aforementioned errors). What this did to the system, was place whatever number of tickets you had requested (1,2) on hold for 10 minutes. This feature, designed to protect your order, would then begin multiplying these “holds” depending on how many times each user retried an order. That can really add up
All the prior explanations still do not justify the fact that the system failed to perform adequately to your needs. We want to take this time to sincerely apologize for the extreme panic and inconvenience caused by these errors.
Our intention was to have something unique and special for our Members, whereas it came across as quite the opposite. We want to assure you that we are working to improve our ticketing solution to ensure that this does not happen again.
Sincerely,
The BowieNet Staff