See Tickets website

[chef]

With Glastonbury ticket day coming up I want to get a better idea how See Tickets website deals with heavy traffic i.e how to have a setup that gives me an advantage. I onlz have a general knowledge of networking in that I am not a network engineer or deal with it on a daily basis.

My general thoughts are that:

- the more Public IP addresses you have then they will be treated as multiple requests by See and that simply having multiple tabs open in a single browser and refreshing manually will essentially be treated as a single session.
- If See based its sessions on something at the application layer like the browser banner (very unlikely), then there might be an advantage in using different browsers from different vendors on the same machine.

other options I've seen banded around to improve chances are:

- multiple Private session tabs in Firefox
- multiple browsers (e.g Firefox, Chrome) open and trying to refresh
- setting auto refresh in Firefox
- VPN to a different network (thus giving a different public IP)
- running a VM session with a second browser trying to connect
- traceroute to the given web address and then using the server IP address

Any ideas if any (or any combination) of the above would give any advantage? reasons why or why not would be appreciated for a better understanding.

cheers
Chef

[yasockie]

I'd maybe try booking over the phone using the international number?

On a technical level, the load balancer should allow only a subset of connections and then preserve them through the session. I noticed that they approach the problem differently each year, but statically setting IP for glastonbury.seetickets.com in hosts file will definitely improve things.
For best results, I'd figure out where SeeTickets IIS servers are hosted, is it Azure? EC2?
I'd then try and get a VM with the same provider in the same zone - if they're using EC2 it's probably Ireland, and buy tickets from that machine by remoting into it.

A few good things you can do on the client side, is boviously register beforehand, cache all the files, maybe block image downloads and Javascript on that website if it doesn't break it and if you know the form field IDs you could try creating a Selenium script to automate the ticket buying process (or if not Selenium create a person in Firefox or Chrome)

Good luck and have fun next year - I hear you can recover the cost of the tickets, just by gathering leftover tents and camping utensils that lazy people just leave behind and flocking them on ebay.

[Freaki Li Cuatre]

Crikey, what a palaver.

I just used to get one of those nice horseback security girls to point me to the hole in the fence