Anyone registered yet?

[Tsom467]

I can't believe it's been overloaded! There are what, about 1200 teams? So at most one person from each team is trying to get in. They can't design a system that can handle 1200 requests at once? Seems ridiculous... They seem to have this capacity problem every year....

<edit> got to the Payment info page.. and it's all last year's info.

If we miss out registering for our first pick, because of their server capacity problems, we'll be very upset....

I finally got thru, and signed up for an event. Interestingly, the invoice lists last year's info: $5000 for first event, due December 1 2003.

[John S.]

Took a while but 123 is signed up for Detroit complete with e-mail confirmation from FIRST

[KathieK]

The TIMS system was very slow this morning as we were trying to update our information from last year... and we kept getting kicked out. I have tried every 5 minutes or so since then to register and either cannot get into the system, or get kicked out at various steps. It's frustrating but there's not much you can do; sicne I work in an IT department I am sympathizing for the folks that are working on the system.

[Tsom467]

Very frustrating. I keep getting closer and closer to the finish. Then I get an "invalid session ID" error and have to start again.

I'm in IT too, and I built a website that was able to handle more than 3500 users at a time.

Yay.. finally, as I was typing this I got my confirmation page. We're registered for Manchester!

[Joe Ross]

Originally Posted by Tsom467

I can't believe it's been overloaded! There are what, about 1200 teams? So at most one person from each team is trying to get in. They can't design a system that can handle 1200 requests at once? Seems ridiculous... They seem to have this capacity problem every year....

Very few database systems can handle 1200 updates/sec. Yes it's possible, but it takes a well designed system. Would you pay an extra $1000 registration fee for a database engineer and serious hardware?

I beleive it was 2 years ago, FIRST had a license for filemaker that allowed 10 concurrent connections. Knowing they would be in trouble if they let everyone directly connect, they implemented another computer as a proxy that would only let 10 people through to the database server at a time. However, the number of connections swampped the proxy and nobody could get through to anything.

EDIT: Since you're in IT, and in the general proximity of Manchester, would you consider volunteering to help them with their capacity issues?

If we miss out registering for our first pick, because of their server capacity problems, we'll be very upset....

Last year, no regional filled up after the first set of registrations. You may have to worry about your second choice in a few weeks, but you should be set now.