Seriously, the amount of whining in these recent threads is staggering. Some of you need to grow up and realize that you are not entitled to the free day discount. Everyone should have come here fully expecting it to be like a lottery, with thousands of others with full shopping carts ready to hit “submit” the moment Free Day started. Just do the math… $100 per household, up to a maximum of $100k, and assuming that everyone takes full advantage of the offer, it would only be about 1000 orders (and according to the front page, it ended up being very close to that number). Of course, because it’s free stuff being given away, everyone should’ve known that several thousand people would show up, with many being “filthy outsiders” who have never ordered from this site before (I’m one of them, btw). The odds were against everyone from the beginning, and I know many of you are frustrated that you didn’t get it, but if you were expecting a guaranteed discount just because you thought you were being clever by filling up your shopping cart early (as if nobody else would think of that), then you only have yourself to blame. The guys as SF should be applauded for giving back in their own, practical way to the tinkering/hacking/whatever community. To see so much whining around here is just sickening. Yes, I got my discount, but I knew going into this that there was a good chance that I wasn’t getting it, so I really can’t see why anyone else would think they would and complain so loudly when they didn’t. Grow up, people.
My guess is we won’t ever have to worry about this kinda thing happening again. That is, due to all the complaining I doubt SparkFun would bother have another free day.
Problem solved…
I’m seriously bumming I didn’t get my order in… but then again, I saw this coming a mile away. (Figuratively speaking of course… if I lived a mile away I would have walked over and gotten my stuff)
All the bandwidth, ports, and throttling in the world can’t fix bottlenecked code/database interactions…and rewriting a network stack entails far more than a few clicks. Familiar with Linux TCP stacks?
This is not true, if one were to bandwidth limit, and control port releases then the code would never get bottlenecked in the first place.
If you only allow so many ports out, this will cure the bottleneck.
I would far rather have the people who got a port to have decent bandwidth (even 1/2 the speed of dialup) to the site to complete the transaction. then to simply give all ports out so effectively most people go no where.
seulater:
This is not true, if one were to bandwidth limit, and control port releases then the code would never get bottlenecked in the first place.
If you only allow so many ports out, this will cure the bottleneck.
I would far rather have the people who got a port to have decent bandwidth (even 1/2 the speed of dialup) to the site to complete the transaction. then to simply give all ports out so effectively most people go no where.
A TCP stack has 65,535 ports, and 1024 of them are reserved, so this effectively gives you 64,511 ports. It was stated that there were 70,000 unique visitors to the site, and if you estimate just three pages open for each visitor, that’s 210,000 pages open. Of course not all pages are active at once, but I would also assume that with all of the refreshing and loading up on pages, that the utilization of ports was quite high.
When a person visits a website, port 80 is opened, but just temporarily as you are reassigned to a random OPEN port to complete the transfer. If you limited the bandwidth to even half the speed, then it would take TWICE as long to free that port. This would effectively create a bottleneck since fewer ports are available. Add the other idea of limiting ports, and what do you get? TIMEOUTS!!!
I’ve worked in an development environment with PHP (language used on SparkFun) with an eCommerce solution with high traffic. I have seen the same scenario as yesterday first hand and I can guarantee you that your idea would MAKE MATTERS WORSE.
Eh, you guys are seriously screwed on a little too tight. It was SFE’s money, they did what they wanted with it. For me, the only downside is having to compete against random internet people with no interest in SFE or their products for what was kind of spun as a “customer appreciation day”.
Check out this post from Fatwallet:
I have to say, most of the things on this website I have never even heard of, so you are right people like me might ruin it for those of you who order this stuff on a regular basis. “With that being said” I could really use some of this stuff. You can never have too many cables/adapters, and this thing is freaking awesome. Thanks OP
“Hey I don’t know who these people are or what it is that they’re selling but I’m happy to take it for free!”
From a sparkfun employee:
I’m in production, so I can’t speak to products that we don’t assemble in house, like the Olimex, but we did build our stock of popular items up tremendously in anticipation of today’s volume. However, it turned out that free-day orders didn’t follow previous trends when it came to item popularity. Thankfully, we still didn’t get killed on our assembled product, so I can actually go home before eight o’clock.
I was disappointed to not see a chart showing the number of previous orders for the lucky thousand on the recap, I think that would say it all. I think SFE is aware of what happened, and are sort of beating around the bush about it.
I’m a new SFE customer as of free day; I’d been vaguely aware of SFE’s existance (mainly as a source of iPhone/iPod connectors), but hadn’t placed an order yet for anything.
I was lucky enough to get through the hordes of other visitors and get my order in. I picked up an Arduino kit that I pieced together, because it seems like a great place to start with microcontrollers, and a soldering station to replace my $5 iron, along with wire, solder, wick, and other bench stock to have on-hand. My order ended up well past the $100 free offering, and the bulk of it are things I might have never gotten around to buying otherwise.
I can’t speak to those folks on Fatwallet, but for me, this was a heck of a great way to get a few projects kick-started, and get me started with Arduinos. So, while I can understand existing customers being unhappy that they couldn’t get in, I’m glad new customers were able to get through.
Total time wasted on trying to get free items from SparkFun: 2 hrs
Total time wasted complaining about it: 2 days
Its funny how you see a lot of people saying stuff like “I wasted 2 hrs yesterday when I could have gotten work done …” yet they’re wasting more time flooding the forums with complaints.
