900 tickets were released this round.
All tickets were held in 7.58 seconds. Yes we verified this.
The waitlist filled up one second after that.
So, by our definition, we sold out in 8.58 seconds. At this point all tickets are accounted for and we take down the registration link. It does take longer for reservations to be completed.
First reservation was completed 7.36 seconds after registration officially opened.
All reservations were complete in 11 minutes 56 seconds.
Our peak load on landing.shmoocon.org was 3300 requests per second, with an average of 2500 requests per second in the 15 seconds leading up to noon.
Some things to note:
The stats we post are what gets reported to us by our ticketing application. Meaning that these times reflect the availability of tickets as they are logged by the application itself. The keyword here is “logged”.
In reality more than a thousand of you had connected to the web server well before those log entries were created. At this point it comes down to various OS FIFO’s and other queues (TCP connection order, process scheduling, etc). It is absolutely possible for you to hit our server prior to the time we post as being sold out and still not get a ticket. Accounting for normal network delays, processing order, and the number of people hitting the server it takes a few seconds for the queue to get unwound by the web and application servers and logs to be generated. That said, the application is keeping track of the ticket queue in memory. When you get a “Sold Out” message from the application, that is correct. That message is only displayed once the main registration queue and waitlist queue are full.
We use the metrics reported to us by the application server as those provide consistent and comparable data. And again, it’s the actual completion of the transaction that to our minds is the fair and right assessment to use. So while one could reasonably argue that we sell out in the (milli)second(s) that we open the flood gates, it’s more correct to call it sold out once we have record of each ticket.
We’ve looked at this round’s data for any shenanigans and don’t see anything out of the norm or anything concerning at this time. The new set up seemed to work as planned and we’re calling this round successful. We’ll have year end stats for you soon.