master_of_robots:
Enjoy!
While I personally have no problem with the image its self, pictures of and links to derogatory material are not welcome.
If people want the link, use PM and keep it out of the general forums.
-Bill
I was unable to get into their site at all until after it was over, but although I am disappointed for not “winning”, I don’t feel they ‘owe’ me anything at all.
I applaud their generous gift by making a fun way to give back for a great year they had in 2009. Many of their customers didn’t get anything out of it, but hey- there’s no entitlement here. Roll the dice, spend the time- your choice. I was chuckling when I set up a ping script for the entire duration and got nothing but 100% packet loss. I pictured the poor IT staff scrambling, perhaps resetting a few times, phones ringing, emails overflowing. And you think YOU had a bad morning trying to get in? They were the ones not only giving away $100,000 but also knowingly setting themselves up for frustration and upset people, who, for some strange reason, lose their tempers when they lose a game. They didn’t win a prize… big deal. Try rushing down and standing in line for free tickets sometime. Same thing.
I respect SparkFun even more now than before- I kept trying while I worked, but never got in until (surprise!) the game was over. Oh well. Better luck next time. Then I looked at the negative comments. Shame on those who think Sparkfun owes anything AT ALL to customers, new customers, or anybody else… they just gave away $100,000 for pete’s sake!
I am happy for those who won…Congratulations people! Maybe next time it will include me… maybe not. It was FREE and by CHOICE.
Let’s all give SparkFun a round of applause and our thanks for attempting something like this in the hopes that we would actually LIKE it when they do it. I know I did. Oh… that’s right… I didn’t get anything either. I guess I will have to actually PAY for the stuff I want. How terrible. 
It would nice for them to hear that we appreciated their generous event, not matter how it turned out for us individually.
I sincerely thank you SparkFun, let’s do it again! :-))
I’d be surprised if more than a couple of people came to the site without orders in their carts already and still managed to get in on the free day deal. With the way the servers were responding, how could you possibly have logged in, filled your cart, and checked out within 1H44?
I suppose some people might have been unusually lucky with server requests, but I’d suspect that if people who hadn’t already filled their carts were removed from the flood of server requests, hardly any of the rest of us would have been able to tell the difference in what happened.
Let’s face it - we knew over a month ago that we would have to be extremely fortunate to have gotten in on the deal. I suppose they could have instead just given randomly chosen customers free stuff until they’d given away $100K worth, but then we’d be complaining about how those customers were chosen, and I’ll bet that some of the ones who HAD been chosen would have complained that they’d have ordered more if they knew it was going to be free.
You can’t win.
phalanx:
master_of_robots:
Enjoy!While I personally have no problem with the image its self, pictures of and links to derogatory material are not welcome.
If people want the link, use PM and keep it out of the general forums.
-Bill
Bill!!! You’re killing me here!
Alright, for all of you that want ASCII-schlong links, just PM me.
master_of_robots:
phalanx:
master_of_robots:
Enjoy!While I personally have no problem with the image its self, pictures of and links to derogatory material are not welcome.
If people want the link, use PM and keep it out of the general forums.
-Bill
Bill!!! You’re killing me here!
Alright, for all of you that want ASCII-schlong links, just PM me.
Is it really quite a derogatory schlong?
tetsujin:
master_of_robots:
phalanx:
While I personally have no problem with the image its self, pictures of and links to derogatory material are not welcome.If people want the link, use PM and keep it out of the general forums.
-Bill
Bill!!! You’re killing me here!
Alright, for all of you that want ASCII-schlong links, just PM me.
Is it really quite a derogatory schlong?
I saw it. It is as tame as can be. I thought it was pretty funny though.
tetsujin:
master_of_robots:
phalanx:
While I personally have no problem with the image its self, pictures of and links to derogatory material are not welcome.If people want the link, use PM and keep it out of the general forums.
-Bill
Bill!!! You’re killing me here!
Alright, for all of you that want ASCII-schlong links, just PM me.
Is it really quite a derogatory schlong?
Imagine the most hugest, most veiniest, most schlongiest swollen member you can…
…now think the total opposite, and you’d be on target.
Giving away a bunch of stuff was nice and all, but they should have been better prepared to handle the traffic. Like so many others, my loaded cart was ready to go. I started trying to checkout the SECOND the “game” started and never got anything except timeouts and broken connection errors.
I agree that it was a great idea, just poor execution. Not that anyone cares, but I recommend that SFE re-thinks their strategy before doing this again. Maybe farm out their cart to Amazon for a day (it might only be 15 minutes) to handle the load or reduce the amount of the give away to $20.00 per person so more people will get something. I don’t know.
I don’t have any ill will towards SFE or expect anything from them, but it was a very frustrating experience with a disapointning outcome and that is not what I have grown to expect from SFE.
Yes, being prepared for the traffic is the hard part. Being in the extreme hosting business, I can tell you that nobody’s crystal ball is perfect in that area. A number of sites have been surprised by the traffic congestion their project created. Then there are the ones you don’t hear about (but I do!) that pay tons of money for their huge site event only to have it fizzle and be far, far less than expectations. You can sure believe that whomever was involved in that got their head on a platter!
Bottom line- when it happens, it happens. Could they have been better prepared? Certainly, in retrospect. Could they and should they have made contingency plans? Absolutely, but many companies don’t know about some of their technology options- they talk to their IT departments, or their web designers, or even their smaller hosting providers: none of these has core competence in this scenario.
In fact, according to their announcements, SF did rewrite their whole site, planned and planned and improved performance… the works. At least the works as far as their team and advisors had the expertise to know about. This is a very common error, so nobody can blame them for making it too.
I knew this would be a problem and was ready for it when it happened- How? They rewrote their site. But they didn’t say anything about load-leveling or multi-homing or contracting contingency services. If they had spent enough money to add those things, they would’ve mentioned one or two of them and my expectations would have been that they did the entire gamut of things needed for success with this type of event (failover testing, geo-based hosting, load testing, atomic transactions, automatic disaster recovery, etc.). Then, how much money and work should they do just for a one-time give away? Your suggestion of contracting this event to a company that can handle it is a good one, but there is still a lot involved to even make that happen without glitches.
Yes, there were a number of things they could’ve done. But then most companies and their inside and outside IT staff don’t know this: this really is a specialized area of technology.
Foresight make the best results, but hindsight makes the best 2nd guessers.
I think it went as well as could be expected, and am only sorry to hear so many complaints. For those who can’t do the math- only 1000 people were going to get anything at all. The world is a very big place. Nobody should’ve had any expectations of getting anything, period. The lucky few were just that: lucky. Everyone else just stay off of their site for the day and let the chaos rule! 
I’m in that category too - basket ready, clicked checkout at 9:01AM MST only to play the refresh/retry game for almost 2 hours. Sour taste? Yes. Mad at SFE? No. I doubt there were many people that were able to put together a cart and check out in 104 minutes. The site was a basket case during that time. All the hacked gadgets posting did was make a bad situation worse. c’est la vie.
Let’s face it, how could you expect a little outfit like SFE to have world class IT? 600 transaction an hour isn’t exactly impressive. I am mad at myself for actually believing their line that they had really beefed up their servers. Even last night, the site was sadly slow with plenty of time outs. So I chose to ignore the obvious warning.
SFE and Nate - you guys were golden before this. I would feel a twinge of guilt when I ordered something from Mouser or DigiKey. No more. I wanted to see you succeed. Now I don’t really care one way or the other. You guys are just another supplier. I’ll certainly be less likely to send people your way. Not for retribution but rather because the edge of loyal fan isn’t there any more. I’m not saying this to be mean, just the facts man.
I would like to see how many open shopping carts that hadn’t completed the transaction there were at 10:44 MST. Want to bet it’s significantly more than 1000? I’d bet it was at least 5 times that.
Phil
tetsujin:
twistlok:
The way i see it is, if you had your order in the shopping cart prior to the end of the promotionHuh? You mean there were people who didn’t have their orders in the shopping carts prior to the beginning of the promotion? Seems kind of brain-dead to me… I mean, are you gonna muddle through about twenty page loads (looking up items and adding them to the cart) while the server is thrashing, or just five or so (the checkout procedure)?
There were people coming into the sparkfun IRC channel, complaining about the server not letting them CREATE accounts an hour and a half into the sale.
That’s actually a very good question and interesting. Although I suspect there may have been a reset or two. I built my shopping cart last night and had also observed the slow downs already. I got up early and was attempting to connect well before the start time. I guess a lot of others had the same idea since I never did get connected to the site until after it was over.
The reason I suspect at least one reset was because when I did finally get in, my shopping cart was empty. Oops. Oh well.
Again, this event should not take anything away from SF- they really did everything they knew to make this a fun event and give back to their community: hobbyists and experimenters. Some old customers and some newbies. It is what it is… nobody should be soured just because a site had a day of tech problems. This really does happen to everyone: amazon, google, microsoft, … everyone.
I will continue to be an avid fan and customer with nothing changed just because I couldn’t connect to their site and win some free stuff this morning.
there were two resets that I am aware of. One before, and one during. They were announcing that in the IRC channel.
Thanks for the confirmation… I wasn’t watching the IRC. Make sense though- if the host is dead, ya gotta do something!
70000 unique visitors. 1000 who will get the discount. The numbers work out pretty simple; 1 in 70 is gonna get the discount. So for everyone who gets an order, 69 walk away without.
Lets run the numbers on server upgrades; I see they just bought 5 dell poweredges @ $5300 each [list price from dell]
And, even if they bought a huge load-balanced cluster just to serve free day; it still comes down to simple math. 1 in 70 gets the discount. With enough compute power to handle any possible load; free day would’ve been over in a second, and there would still be 69 disappointed people for every lucky winner.
EDIT: and if they had the compute power to let everyone checkout simultaneously, there would be calls that the script kiddies won because people with scripts could get in in the first 10msec.
–David Carne
<LOL!> Yes, you are absolutely right. In fact, I had roughly estimated that if they had had capacity, it would be over in 2 to 3 seconds. One possible solution is a monte-carlo bandwidth limiting solution- For a group of connection requests coming in a window of say, 3 seconds, randomly pick one (or two, or whatever limits the user load to let the site server do its job without too much delay). The others get a ‘sorry, but your connection request was not one that was randomly selected during this attempt- please try again’ message.
If the spin of the reject message was done right, it could be fun even if you missed the luck of the draw. Still only one in 70 would make it, so there would probably still be poor losers out there complaining about trying 70 times and not getting into the magic ordering page.
Good post, good numbers, thanks.
Hellmark:
tetsujin:
twistlok:
The way i see it is, if you had your order in the shopping cart prior to the end of the promotionHuh? You mean there were people who didn’t have their orders in the shopping carts prior to the beginning of the promotion?
There were people coming into the sparkfun IRC channel, complaining about the server not letting them CREATE accounts an hour and a half into the sale.
Heh. Morons… XD
Im pretty peeved.
Not that I didn’t get free stuff, just really annoyed how poorly executed the promotion was.
They had tons and tons of time to prepare for this, and there were a lot of “optimizations” they could have done to prevent this from happening.
greensasquatch:
They can also do a bit to bring back any alienated customers by extending a bit of a deal. I don’t say give away more free stuff, how will that help their business.
Why not? Let’s say that I buy $2000 worth of stuff from SF a year. Let’s assume their profit margin is 50%. Then their profit from me is $1000. If they loose me as a customer over this $100 stunt, then that’s a net loss to them of $900.
Let break down a few thing everyone should consider.
-
Human behavior and psychology.
-
Publicity and arguments.
-
Marketing and business strategy.
1 Human behavior and psychology:
I’m happy to see many people actually get the point: “I didn’t get the free stuff I wanted; something or someone must be held accountable for what just happened”. Deep down the bottom this is the truth, , because I’m a still a boy and electronics stuff it’s like candy to me.
2 Publicity and argumentations.,
I said before “something or someone must be held accountable for what just happened”, that doesn’t discard me as an option, I should consider the end result may have been my own fault. I’m not that silly to believe that I can win every fight.
Been that said, I do believe that I did nothing wrong except expecting too much from the site, you may call it an excess of faith.
It was never mentioned that there was going to be such a problem with the servers, the information provided actually encouraged many people to believe that the servers actually worked better than before.
I work with machines many times more powerful than the intel servers running this site, If I want to test load on a service (http) I’ll use one of the many available software to do so before doing any migration. Benchmarking are for dummies a one should always run its own tests, before going to production.
If you decided to mix freeday with an application/system test then there is a real problem in the company, believe me I have never seen it before in my years of experience as a unix sysadmin.
3 Marketing and business strategy:
I’ll be honest about how I feel about sparkfun, I love their products, I’ve been a fan of the site for a while, not a big spender however.
But honestly with the prices you have many times I buy elsewhere, Today I assumed that many people like me that actually had a big shopping cart you would actually earn money instead of loosing, by a much lower margin of course, but earning anyway.
Many people is pissed off and I totally understand them, I’m more on their side, I don’t think they are all fools, as I said before this is human conduct and the marketing department among other things should have expected that this kind of strategy must be carried away very precisely. It wasn’t at all like that, for all I know someone DOS yours servers stole a couple of credit card numbers and fled away with your servers popping smoke (sorry we sysadmins are paranoid about this stuff).
In this scenario no one wins, next time development and testing on one side, marketing on another.
The answer maybe…, lower your prices offer discounts once in a while, and you’ll get much more attention than this carnage we just saw.
Regards.
Ben.