Olympics ticket system crashes

Only half an hour after this week's start of second-round ticket sales for the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, the online booking system broke down.

In a statement published Tuesday night, the Beijing Olympic Committee said it had decided to temporarily halt domestic ticket sales in the second phase to improve the technical plan.

"Because of the overwhelming volume of page visits, the technical system was unable to perform the tasks well enough, and many applicants were unable to successfully submit their applications," the committee said.

Eight million hits and 200,000 orders per second overwhelmed the technical system, Chinese news site Xinhua reported.

Ticketmaster, which hosts the site, is working on a solution to the deluge.

Suzanne Tindal of ZDNet Australia reported from Sydney.

[regulator1956]

I'm calling BS

"Eight million hits and 200,000 orders per second overwhelmed the technical system, Chinese news site Xinhua reported."

I'm just guessing here, but 8mm hits isn't that many. 200,000 orders per second is a monster. Those numbers don't jibe.

This is the second round. How many tickets are there? If the site was up for half an hour, and they processed 200,000 tickets per second for 2 minutes, that would be 24,000,000 million tickets.

I think they got some decimal points wrong.

[joeDimagio]

They should change the system

If they are using Ticketmaster, which uses Lunux and Apache, they should dump it. So much for the Lunus hype.