Spirit was willing, but servers were weak

Consensus among experts is vendor misjudged traffic

James Paton And Jeff Smith, Rocky Mountain News

Published October 23, 2007 at midnight

Text size

More Local News

The Colorado Rockies offered a terse explanation for the ticket fiasco, saying only that the team and its fans had been victims of an "external malicious attack."

Computer experts late Monday were a lot more talkative.

Dave Bahr explained it this way: Imagine rush hour traffic is approaching downtown Denver, and someone with a sick sense of humor purposely sends "a whole bunch of cars out there and parks them on the highways" leading into the city, clogging the system.

Bahr, chairman of the computer science department at Regis University, calls it "a denial of service attack" that overloads the system.

Alek Komarnitsky, a Lafayette computer systems administrator, agreed that's a possibility. But he wondered about the Rockies explanation, saying in an e-mail "it certainly would be a convenient excuse for the problems today."

"A skeptic might wonder that perhaps they figured out the root cause of today's problem and figured this might be a way to come out smelling like a rose on it," he wrote. "Hopefully, the Rockies organization plays baseball, not those type of games."

The Rockies and MLB.com were confident they could handle the flood of online orders, which began 10 a.m. Monday. Among other things, MLB.com said it had experience handling such events, and processes would be fully tested beforehand.

But the transaction system, handled by ticket vendor Paciolan Inc., of Irvine, Calif., collapsed under the weight of 8.5 million "hits," team officials said.

While MLB.com handles all the Internet traffic for the 30 major league baseball teams, clubs select their own ticket vendors. Paciolan handles the online ticket sales of five major league baseball teams, including the Rockies, but works closely with MLB.com.

Komarnitsky also speculated that the vendor could have simply underestimated the demand. "I just think they got swamped," he said. "All indications are that their infrastructure was overloaded. The other hint is it knocked ticket ordering offline for other venues" such as the Denver Center for the Performing Arts.

Komarnitsky thought it was odd that traffic seemed to be sent to three particular servers, while it appeared that at least 15 servers were available. Normally traffic is distributed among servers to balance the traffic load.

Experts could not tell for sure if automated software tools used by ticket brokers contributed to the problem, but Bahr said "it sounds like that to me."

Bahr said the problem clearly was exacerbated by the fact that anyone in the world could get into a queue to buy the tickets. He said he believes the Rockies should have given priority to buyers with Colorado billing addresses. "In retrospect they should have held a lottery," Bahr said. "It's nice and simple."

Paciolan Inc.

• Headquarters: Irvine, Calif.

• Business: Said it sold about 120 million tickets last year, representing a 25 percent market share of live event ticket sales in the United States. Ticketmaster announced in July an agreement to acquire Paciolan.

• Major League Baseball customers: Arizona Diamondbacks, Colorado Rockies, New York Mets, Philadelphia Phillies, San Diego Padres.

• Other customers include: Denver Center for the Performing Arts, Nashville Speedway, University of Nebraska, Ohio State University, Theater Under the Stars.

smithje@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-5155

Subscribe to the Rocky Mountain News