Ticket master for example. Whenever there’s a high volume of traffic, the website crashes or experiences problems. Surely they know that there’s going to be a huge surge in traffic all at once? Can they not design the website to cope with the increase in demand and function like normal?
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One of the things you may have noticed with Reddit is that you may see a different set of comments on different devices. A lot of this is what is known as “eventual consistency” – basically, they don’t care if the data is slightly different for different users, as long as it eventually all gets to the same state.
Amazon actually uses this same type of trick, which will, very rarely, result in them allowing you to purchase an item that is out of stock. Due to their large number of items, generally large stockpiles, and often fast restocking, it rarely comes up in the first place, and, when it does, its likely just a short delay. In the worst case, Amazon would issue a refund and cancel the order.
That type of pattern doesn’t work well with ticket sales, especially if they are tied to a specific seat. The risk is very high multiple people will manage to buy the same ticket and thus result in cancelations and refunds, which the ticket seller really needs to minimize for a good user experience. This means they have to actively serialize all access to ensure two people cannot buy the same ticket, and that makes scaling really hard.
What they can do is to have each event isolated to a server as there will be no overlap between them, however if 10,000 people all want to buy tickets to the same event, that doesn’t help. They can also isolate off the graphics and other fixed content to other servers, which most will have done, typically via a content-delivery network (CDN).
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