Queueing system

[Ferretfancy]

Can anyone explain why the system specifically bans you from logging in before 9 AM, but if you wait until exactly 9 you are told that the waiting room is already full, and please try later? If the system is as it says it is, who is in the waiting room before the witching hour?

I finally submitted my plan at 1030, and was nearly 6000 in the queue, but got there after an hour or so. Once on board the wretched system kept failing to recognise my address and password, leading to repeated hair tearing until at last it worked. I think Prince Albert invented their system just before he died.

I'm off to Euston for the Lakes this afternoon, and I was beginning to wonder if I might miss the train.

No Internet or mobile phone in our valley, Hooray!

[amateur51]

Can anyone explain why the system specifically bans you from logging in before 9 AM, but if you wait until exactly 9 you are told that the waiting room is already full, and please try later? If the system is as it says it is, who is in the waiting room before the witching hour?

I finally submitted my plan at 1030, and was nearly 6000 in the queue, but got there after an hour or so. Once on board the wretched system kept failing to recognise my address and password, leading to repeated hair tearing until at last it worked. I think Prince Albert invented their system just before he died.

I'm off to Euston for the Lakes this afternoon, and I was beginning to wonder if I might miss the train.

No Internet or mobile phone in our valley, Hooray!

I hope that you have a great break Ferret - lots of wonderful countryside/pubs to visit

[Ferretfancy]

Thanks Ams, The Drunken Duck calls!

[Petrushka]

Can anyone explain why the system specifically bans you from logging in before 9 AM, but if you wait until exactly 9 you are told that the waiting room is already full, and please try later? If the system is as it says it is, who is in the waiting room before the witching hour?

I wondered this as well. I went on to the RAH site at 7.50 and got 'waiting room full' then. I stayed there and hit the 'submit Proms Planner' button on the dot of 9am as the BBC clock changed on TV. 'Waiting room full' immediately. It doesnt really make sense and would appreciate an explanation from someone who knows the system.

Taking into account that the two Dr Who Proms would have some 10,000 tickets, both sold out before I even booked and the fact that I was in at nearly 7000 seems to suggest that hordes of fans were booking those concerts alone.

As for the ticket touts...

[Flosshilde]

I do wonder if they are making a mountain out of a molehill? Other festivals (eg Edinburgh) simply use the standard on-line booking system that most theatres use, without any problem.

[roger]

Last year I was in within 5 minutes, but this morning I spent about 50 minutes clicking between two browser windows before I entered the queue. About 6000 ahead of me, the system was accepting about 10 users per second. So an hour later I was able to buy my arena season ticket. It all went smoothly when my turn came, and the confirmation email arrived in seconds. But with thousands of Dr Who fans trying to book... It would have helped if the screens were different as I may well have missed a successful response earlier.

With the suspicion of The Ring in 2013, the regular season ticket prommers were worried about a large influx of Wagner fans going for seasons, but the new weekly tickets probably avoided that.

[amateur51]

Thanks Ams, The Drunken Duck calls!

Just taken a look Ferret - what a wonderful place!

I hope your break goes terribly well

[Nick Armstrong]

I do wonder if they are making a mountain out of a molehill? Other festivals (eg Edinburgh) simply use the standard on-line booking system that most theatres use, without any problem.

I wonder the same thing. And quite apart from the schemozzle described in this thread, I can't be doing with a system where you can't choose your seats, in that massive bathroom of all places where the acoustic is so wildly variable and often unbearable. Call me grouchy

[amateur51]

I wonder the same thing. And quite apart from the schemozzle described in this thread, I can't be doing with a system where you can't choose your seats, in that massive bathroom of all places where the acoustic is so wildly variable and often unbearable. Call me grouchy

Couldn't agree more, grouchy

The Henry Wood Proms Festival- it's what's your radio's for

[VodkaDilc]

Just under three hours! Two concerts were fine, but only cheap tickets left for Pappano on 19 July and only restricted view for First Night. Took the first, but thought First Night would be better at home (a very long concert too, so trains would be tight!)

Pappano concert now sold out - as well as Mahler 2/Jansons and the latest John Wilson 'entertainment'.

[Resurrection Man]

Curious to know why we think it was the Doctor Who fans clogging up the system...

Still waiting for my confirmation email.

Re logging in at 9am...and here I am guessing. They have two systems...one is the main RAH website and ticketing system..where all the horsepower needs to be. This is front-ended by the waiting room system which seems to have an upper limit as to how many people can be in it. 7000? 8000? That is probably an arbitrary number as the computer horsepower needed to manage this relatively trivial task isn't huge. So they could have an upper limit of 20,000 but I am guessing that they think people might not want to stay gazing at their screens for the whole day as they make their way up the queue.

It is very easy for them to set a flag that effectively keeps the waiting room door closed until their main system is ready to take callers. That would give you the 'waiting room full' message. Once that door is opened then it's luck of the draw...your data bytes making it to the head of the queue to get in that door before someone else's

[french frank]

Curious to know why we think it was the Doctor Who fans clogging up the system...

Not only them, I suppose. But for both concerts to sell out so quickly argues some eagerness.

Add: they tweeted that both had sold out 7 hours ago.

[Simon B]

I went on to the RAH site at 7.50 and got 'waiting room full' then. I stayed there and hit the 'submit Proms Planner' button on the dot of 9am as the BBC clock changed on TV. 'Waiting room full' immediately. It doesnt really make sense and would appreciate an explanation from someone who knows the system.

From a technical standpoint this behaviour doesn't seem suspicious to me, and is what I've experienced most years. This year, I got into the queue at a few seconds past 9, at about position 350 - probably just at random.

The long version:
These systems are stochastic ("statistical" in simple terms) and both depend on and deal with the inherent randomness of the internet. They are also hierarchical. There's a bit that can serve an enormous volume of requests and fast, but only with the "system full" page. Then there's another bit which can maintain say 5000 people in a queue, but only handle adding or subtracting maybe a few hundred a second to/from that queue. Then there's the actual booking system that can perhaps only handle a thousand people at a time, and only a limited transaction rate for each of these individuals. The technical challenges are nontrivial, particularly with regard to synchronisation.

At 09:00 there are probably thousands of requests per second hitting the system as say 20,000 people all simultaneously keep retrying to get in. Only a few hundred can be added to the actual queue per second, which will thus build to its limit of thousands over tens of seconds. Everyone else will be served a "system full" page in the interim. Eventually, the queue will be filled to its limit and then people can only be added to the queue at a much lower rate determined by how quickly people are falling off the other end in and out of the booking system. The majority of new attempts to join the queue are thus met with "system full".

Who gets onto the queue in the first seconds to minutes is essentially determined by randomness (when you press the button, the route and round trip delay to packets of data sent from your computer via your ISP and a series of somewhat random hops to the system's server farm). The system may deliberately add further randomness to try to ensure a random fairness algorithm is operating.

The short version: It's a fluke.

[Petrushka]

Thanks for those explanations from RM and SimonB. Looks like there's nothing more I can do than I am doing already then.

Re the Dr Who cloggers: I got the message that both concerts had sold out at 10.30 before I had even left the waiting room. Assuming a combined seating capacity of, say, 10,000 and putting this against SimonB's working out above I'd say that this strongly suggests a huge demand for just those two concerts. One wonders how many of them came from the professional computers and lap-tops of ticket touts and e-bay sellers.

By the time I submitted my Proms Plan at 10.43 I fully expected at least one to have sold out. As it happens I got an excellent seat for Götterdämmerung and pretty much what I wanted elsewhere.

[Il Grande Inquisitor]

Similar tale of woe here. On the dot of 9am, I hit the Proms Planner button and kept refeshing every few seconds for 48 minutes before I was admitted into the waiting room - I was beginning to think it must be the cupboard under Roger Wright's stairs, so limited in space. Once in - at #5952 - things moved pretty swiftly (at the rate of 1000 places every 10-15 minutes) and once I was in, I was done and dusted in 2 minutes. I'm left wondering why people hadn't submitted/prepared a Proms planner in advance? Surely gaining admittance and then mooching about for an hour to select your Proms was only clogging the system up for the rest of us?

I wonder the same thing. And quite apart from the schemozzle described in this thread, I can't be doing with a system where you can't choose your seats, in that massive bathroom of all places where the acoustic is so wildly variable and often unbearable. Call me grouchy

I quite agree. Not being able to select your seats is a pain. I also think it's unfair on those people working when booking opens. I was lucky enough to be working at a pc and had my own laptop from home on which I could monitor progress. There has to be a fairer system. I suspect it's called postal booking.