Get your ticket in under 3 minutes.

// 01 — The problem

What's wrong with Ticketmaster

Ticketmaster is the world's leading ticketing company. Yet for fans, every big on-sale feels like an ordeal. Here's what I hold against their system.

What's broken under the hood

I took apart a checkout page running on Ticketmaster France's infrastructure, in September 2026. Here's what the architecture gets wrong.

• A blank page first. The server sends an almost empty shell and the whole page is built in your browser. Until the JavaScript finishes, you stare at white.
• API calls in a chain. Each request waits for the previous one before starting. The server is fast, but prices still take seconds to appear.
• Every visitor hits the inventory. Each page load fires dozens of API calls, many of which can't be cached. Multiply that by a million fans and the shared ticketing system chokes.
• The waiting room shows up late. The virtual queue only loads after the rest of the page. It's supposed to protect the system, not arrive after the crowd.
• Things nobody asked for. Menus in every language, lists of cities and music genres, cross-selling suggestions: all loaded before or alongside the prices.
• Heavy for no reason. Hundreds of requests, JavaScript split into far too many files, oversized images and a CAPTCHA loaded twice.

// 02 — It's been done

Other industries already handle worse

Selling 200,000 seats in a few minutes isn't science fiction. Every year, online retail, payments and streaming absorb much bigger rushes, and they hold.

Selling out 200,000 seats means about 1,000 reservations per second: less than 0.2% of Alibaba's peak. The real issue isn't server power. It's how the sale is designed:

1. A randomized queue. Everyone arrives before the opening, the order is drawn at random, and each person sees their real position.
2. Admission matched to inventory. Only as many people get in as the remaining seats can serve.
3. Seats locked before payment. Once your card is out, your seats are yours. No "sold out" at checkout.
4. Shared inventory, no quotas. An open registry lets several resellers sell the same seats without ever selling one twice.
5. An instant "sold out". The moment everything is gone, the whole queue knows within seconds.

// 03 — The proof

The live stress test

I'm designing a ticketing platform built for these moments, and I'll put it to the test in public, with a real simulated sale. No real tickets, no real payments.

Raw results, load-testing scripts and the registry code will be published as open source, whether the test succeeds or not.