eddie posted this when during the beastie boys went on sale, it explains why the waiting room shows up during ticket sales. obviously the red sox virtual room didn't show of this time.
the best tale of buying beastie boy tickets was the person who got through via dial-up with so many boasting of having fast T1s and still getting shutout. it's about karma and luck sometimes folks... and stopping your clicking
So, we got a non technical explanation of exactly what transpired today:
The Beastie Boys 9:30 and HFS links sold out in about 15 seconds, the Beastie Boys link sold out in about 35 seconds. The reason for the "Red Sox Waiting room" was because of the extremely high demand. It had no interference with the sales, but was used merely as a holding area for the thousands of people that were clicking on refresh after the event had already sold out. Basically, we have several boxes/servers that are used to service traffic on Tickets.com. Because the demand was so much greater than normal our 930 box sold the 600 tickets to those lucky persons and then got filled up with traffic from everyone else still attempting to get tickets. Then once our 930 box filled up, we had a predesignated back up box, a "Generic virtual waiting room" box that took over and handled the excess load. The traffic on Tickets.com was so great that this box filled to capacity as well. Once this happened the back up to the Generic VWR box is the "Red Socks Virtual waiting room" box. Although the "Red Sox Virtual waiting room" was confusing, it was a necessary back up to the back up that prevented the Tickets.com system from crashing. This all occurred in a period of 35 seconds, so although patrons believe that they were unable to get tickets due to technical reasons, the truth is that
the performance had already sold out at that point when the virtual waiting rooms went into affect.
