Well, the test seems to have worked in that Comic-Con International was able to actually sell 1000 tickets. But it all happened so fast.
People logging into the TicketLeap site were able, after some hanging, to get in and register for tickets. But according to Jonah Weiland, who joined with others to attempt to buy tickets, within moments, a “Checkout failed: Not enough tickets remain for the event to fulfill your purchase” result came up. So about 1000 tickets were sold in 60 seconds. Given the 250-requests-a-second that David Glanzer referred to yesterday, that’s not hard to believe.
After the initial wave, soon a server fail came up:
Of course, this didn’t stop people from hitting refresh and hanging on, Hotel-sale-day-stylee. Comments from the TicketLeap page:
I’m starting to lose hope. Even if I mash F5 till the drop down box shows up by the time I click it there aren’t any left.
Are they really gone? 1000 tickets on 5 minutes?!

What is going on?! Is is sold out already? The button on the site still works! AHH!

This goes on for some 64 pages.
On Twitter, people were not happy either:
What was the point of the Comic-Con Registration Test? To see how many geeks they could piss off for a 3rd time? ARRGH!!!
The Comic-Con twitter stated:
Thank you, the member registration test is complete. We will be analyzing the data.
It’s possible a few tickets may come back online as data is confirmed.
As of right now people are shaking their fists and cursing and moaning that Comic-Con sucks and they aren’t going…much the same as every Hotel-o-ween.
And you know what? Whenever tickets go on sale again, these people will be right back online, hitting refresh.
The local Channel 8 station saw fit to file a news report:
UPDATE: We contacted David Glanzer on whether the test worked and he says:
The test went as planned. I think one of the important things is that we made 1,000 badges available and we were able to sell 1,000. Last two attempts we could only process a handful so in that respect yes, it was a success.
We will now spend the next two weeks or so going over the data and seeing exactly what worked, and what needs adjusting. Hopefully we’ll have an announcement in January as to how we’re going to move forward.
There’s also a report on Ticket Leap’s blog:
http://blog.ticketleap.com/index.php/2010/12/15/comic-con-test-recap/
It worked, though they did get thumped in the first minute and half the tickets were held until 8:30, but now they know how many servers to go live with.
Never mind 250 requests per second, this time it was 844!
Maybe the good news is that only(!) 51,658 people tried to buy. So half the tickets will sell in the first 5 minutes when they finally go live… and then the remaining pile of them will dribble away over a couple of months.
Or 500,000 people chose to skip this test and the tickets will all sell in 2 minutes.
In other news: I fail at math. Yeah, it’s going to sell out in 2 minutes.