May 17th, 2006.
This was an "interesting" day for us. There were two things
that made it "special". It was the first day we were processing
TBR "bids" taken via our new
online bidding system,
and it was the first day we got to use some new registrars.
The combination of these caused a bit of overload which
led to trouble.
In short, we had two problems. We did not get the queue
prioritized correctly, and we had a problem on the server
that was running the new registrars and myreg.ca which messed
up the timing and caused us to submit domains slower than
we should have. We started OK, but our subsequent requests
were not spaced as well as they should have been.
Both these issues have been fixed. The tools for prioritizing
the queue (we used to do this manually) have been finished,
although I am sure we will continue to tweak them. And the
backend system has been changed to use separate communications
channels for each registrar.
Both these issues would were caused by tight timelines. CIRA certified
the new registrars a couple hours before the TBR run
(and we are thankful, not critical :), so we didn't get much of a
chance to test running them in their final config. And the
prioritization trouble showed up at the close of bidding
(15 minutes before the run) when we went to do the prioritization
and realized we had far too many orders to do the prioritization by hand
as we have previously.
Even with these problems, we had a reasonably good day.
Our market share was 23.3%, we registered more domains than
any other group of registrars (173 vs 141 in 2nd place), we
completed a number of orders which had been "bid up" above retail
pricing (a low percentage, due to the bad prioritization). The
only thing we didn't do was register any of the domains that
would have gone to a post-registration auction.
-Tom Brown
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