It’s certainly been a busy month and we promised you updates on what we’ve been up to in regards to the upcoming ticket sales tomorrow.  Well, Major Tom, take your protein pills and put your helmet on – commencing countdown.

Concurrency (or lack thereof)
As we discussed earlier, our previous hosting provider had a CDN that unfortunately interfered with everyone seeing the link for tickets at the same instant. We looked around and found another provider that should solve our concurrency problems. After numerous conversations with their tech staff and testing of our own, we’re cautiously optimistic that when we publish the link at noon everyone will see the same thing at the same time.

Performance (or what we had plenty of last time)
The one drawback with the new provider is we’re on our own instance as opposed to a big, elastic cloudy-thing. The last round we saw no performance issues at all as people pounded on our main website. This round we’ll have a different architecture, but we believe the architecture and systems in place can handle the load. After numerous conversations with their tech staff and testing of our own, we’re cautiously optimistic that when we publish the link at noon everyone will see the same thing at the same time without lots of 503’s or other excitement.

See what we did there?

Waitlist
We received numerous queries about the waitlist last round. There were a lot of people stuck on the list for a long time. We have enough stats on how the waitlist gets filled and emptied from the last few years that we’ve tightened up the waitlist code. We expect fewer people in the waitlist and when the waitlist is drained you’ll get a message stating as such (rather than just dropping the server process all together like we have in the past).  After numerous conversations with OUR tech staff and testing of our own, we’re cautiously optimistic that when we publish the link at noon everyone will see the same thing at the same time without lots of 503’s or other excitement and those that end up on the waitlist will have a better experience than last time.

Payment
We had to switch payment providers this year (come to 0wn the C0n to find out why… nothing scandalous, just too long for here). Because of that we had totally new code for payment in round 1. We found out we had issues with some browsers not able to access our payment page. We’ve reviewed our code and think we have a solution  that will work.  But after numerous conversations with their tech staff, our tech staff and testing of our own, we’ve decided not to push that change for this round.  However we are cautiously optimistic that when we publish the link at noon everyone will see the same thing at the same time without lots of 503’s or other excitement and those that end up on the waitlist will have a better experience than last time and those that get a ticket are able to pay with the browser of their choice in Round 3.

But for tomorrow – use Safari or Chrome. Please and Thank You.

Planet Earth is blue and there’s nothing I can do. See you at noon.