The Eighty-Twenty Solution

The Colorado Rockies have suspended online sales for World Series tickets, spokesman Jay Alves said this afternoon...He said the servers were overwhelmed this morning and that officials had no idea that so many people would try the website.

The last line is a little odd: it's the World Series, guys.  The ticket sales during the playoffs should have tipped you off: 50,000 people showing up for a night game where the temperature's in the 40's and it's raining, for example.  So the predictable thing that would happen is upwards of a million people going to the Rockies' ticket sales site at around 9:45 AM and hitting refresh until the system let them in.  The sad thing is that this is, literally, the big leagues.  It's not a few guys who put together some goofy application (say Twitter, or some Facebook widget) suddenly finding unexpected success.  It's a developer's nightmare: as Glenn Berry said:

The situation they faced this morning is a hard problem to solve. They knew they were going to see a tremendous spike in traffic and load, that would only last an hour or two if things went well. What do you do in that situation? Does it make economic sense to have that much reserve capacity vs. the cost of having the system fail?

I'd be interested to find out what the post-mortem says about the cause of the failure.  I suspect it'll be the usual suspects: a system trying to generate too much content dynamically without leveraging downline caching.  I don't think it'll even end up being a question of reserve capacity, just a question of doing too much unnecessary work.