We were looking to go the SYOS route to complement the best seat function on our website.
We have 2 large facilities (12,000 seats, 15,000 seats) and 1 smaller one at 3000 seats, and closer to the dates of our performances the website exhibits massive spikes of traffic to all of these 43 performances simultaneously . Does anyone see an issue with SYOS performance; seating, application slow down for users, seat server performance, or any other issues as a result of so many users accessing the SYOS map all at the same time?
Michael
When we set up SYOS at SOH, we made the decision to switch it off for major onsales.
We were concerned about performance (particularly load times with a lot of customers hitting the SYOS app for the same venue at the same time), but the most significant factor in the decision was that in the SYOS implementation (and I think this is true for all of them), the seat isn't actually reserved until the customer adds it to the cart.
When seats are selling rapidly, we could see many customers getting confused and frustrated (and annoyed) when they selected seats, but by the time they added them to the cart, they were no longer available.
Ken
We have also made the decision to turn off SYOS for major on sales. One of our Arena's has a capacity of around 2500 and we found that for really popular shows with SYOS on, the website started crawling to a snails pace. We have a 10 Mbit link to the Internet and found this was getting saturated with the SYOS traffic.
There were a few options we considered such as a waiting room, or increased network bandwidth but in the end decided upon just removing SYOS for big shows due to cost.
What would it take to keep SYOS active and performing well during high traffic times?
Has anyone implemented a waiting room feature that automatically puts the web user in a waiting room the minute SYOS reaches a certain level of traffic.
We don't implement a waiting room, and we don't take our SYOS off line for high volume. So far we have been able to deal with our high volume sales days by using a big pipe. :-)
We use a 10Gbit pipe which is burstable to 100Gbit. With it being burstable we don't have to pay for the extra bandwidth all year. As well as the dynamic nature of the pipe, our high volume sales days are highly predictable so we are able to ramp up our server resources in advance. All of our servers are VM making it pretty straightforward to add more resources including RAM and CPU if needed. Along with with these tactics we have examined our SYOS code extensively to make sure it is as performant as possible.
Our last high volume sales day we had no noticeable performance degredation on our website. At some point we may consider a waiting room, but currently we don't find it necessary. As well, I always feel that if I have to make someone wait after they have made their decision to purchase it gives them a chance to change their mind. Not sure if I like the idea of putting them in a waiting room with the risk of them leaving, but I know it may be necessary at times.
James
Thanks everyone for your feedback.