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The tickets for the 2009 Glastonbury festival went on sale at 9AM this morning. As I expected, the ticket-selling site is completely inundated and can’t cope.  The same thing happens every year, and every year they promise to make it better next time. I think the problem is compounded by the fact that it has now become The Festival To Be At. Thus, people who can afford to do so, and companies, hire people to get the tickets for them. As a result, there are thousands of people being paid to keep logging on and who will keep trying and trying and trying, probably on multiple computers, until they finally get in. Add to these the “normal” festival goers keen to repeat previous pleasurable times and we have the current situation.

But it is avoidable. I used to run computer systems that sold online and when this sort of thing is expected, you beef up your database server as much as possible and add more customer-facing servers to your cluster. And no-one is going to tell me that this wasn’t expected. This annual ticket-gaining fiasco is just a result of trying to do things on the cheap.

I got through, eventually, at 12:30 after 3 and a half hours of almost solid trying.

Of course, no-one knows yet whether the Glastonbury 2009 will be like this:

glasto2

Or like this

glasto3

And that’s part of the fun!

Cheers, Tom.

P.S. Only the top one is my picture. The middle one is from The Guardian, the bottom one from the official Glastonbury website.