Looking for other Tessitura users that have a web virtual waiting room for peak traffic.
We have Lion King going on sale in December of 2009. Had WICKED in our venue April 2009 and had our ticketing web site crash twice.
Looking for a fix. Is a virtual waiting room it?
Any insite would be appreciated.
Thanks
Lisa Eichers
Salt Lake County Center for the Arts-ArtTix
leichers@slco.org
We had this same problem and we spent a considerable amount of time and money to resolve it. It turned out to be many problems and not just one. Some of the issues we encountered:
- Bandwidth size and speed for both the API and web servers (assuming they are in different locations)
- Server RAM available (we increased the RAM on our database server to 8GB) We bought Windows Server Enterprise edition so the system would recognize and use the extra RAM.
- Best Seating - we set up smaller sections for large venues. This helps the best seating function because the system did not have to scroll through large sections to find the next available seat. We have a 10,000 seat venue and we split it up int sections of 100 or more. We also improved the performance of best seating by allowing it to leave single seats.
- SOAP compression - this is part of the web application
There were other smaller issues but you may get the point. I suggest having an experience technical resource take a look at the whole picture to help you discover where your weak points are. We did this and our consultant set up a testing routine that would place orders so that we could see where the system was slowing down. You can narrow it down to a process (credit cards, seating, etc.) and you can also narrow it down by web page. This helped us tremendously as it led us to the Best Seating issue.
All this being said, it is difficult to size a system to handle these large sales that happen just a few times a year. So no, I don't think that a virtual waiting room is THE answer. I suspect you have a variety of issues going on. This is an ongoing issue and to resolve some of these issues it took about 6 months of testing and working with several people (Tessitura, web developer, ISP, technical consultant, etc.).
Hope this helps.