13 million people, 1.5 lakh tickets: the waiting is the cost

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1 point 3 crore people log in. For about 1 point 5 lakh Coldplay tickets. Here's the twist. Selling them is the easy part.

Coldplay, Mumbai. At noon, the site buckles. About 15 minutes late, the sale really starts. A queue, and suspicious traffic blocked. Sold out in under an hour. Within hours, tickets are on resale sites. BookMyShow files a police complaint.

At about 3 tickets each, that's roughly 50,000 buyers. One person in 260. Over 45 minutes, about 19 checkouts a second. Tiny.

So what's expensive? The nearly 13 million who won't get in. If each asks is it my turn every 10 seconds? 1 point 3 million requests a second. To say not yet. So poll slower the further back you are. About 220,000 a second, all from the edge cache.

Everyone waits at the edge. A static page, cached status. Nearly free. At 12:00:00, everyone already waiting gets a random position. Refreshing at 11:59 earns nothing. About 3,000 people choose and pay at once. Each finished checkout frees one slot. Admission follows completions, not a timer.

Let is it my turn reach the core? The crowd takes it down first. The selling is tiny. The waiting is the cost. Make it nearly free.

Full breakdown in the lecture.