Marathon Weekend 2023

[fatmanatee]

Can you confirm if everything was sold out or not in July?

Via the thread mentioned on the prior page:

2022
Start (link)
Opening queues stating wait of 8 min to over an hour (link); Timing does not appear until exact time of registration opening
No more queue after 21 min (link)
5k sold out in 45 min (link)
HM sold out in 86 min (link)
10k sold out in 5 hours (link)
Goofy sold out in 2.5 days (link)
Dopey/M sold out on 10/12 (link)
*All races periodically reopened.

 

[matt and beth]

Via the thread mentioned on the prior page:

2022
Start (link)
Opening queues stating wait of 8 min to over an hour (link); Timing does not appear until exact time of registration opening
No more queue after 21 min (link)
5k sold out in 45 min (link)
HM sold out in 86 min (link)
10k sold out in 5 hours (link)
Goofy sold out in 2.5 days (link)
Dopey/M sold out on 10/12 (link)
*All races periodically reopened.

Okay thanks. We signed up in September. So there’s definitely something going on. There were lots of people scared to attend but hard to believe that big of a difference

 

[camaker]

Okay thanks. We signed up in September. So there’s definitely something going on. There were lots of people scared to attend but hard to believe that big of a difference

Also keep in mind that Marathon Weekend has a big international draw. Last year there were still a lot of travel restrictions in place, which would only increase international demand now that things are normalizing along with the extra draws of the anniversaries and theming.

 

[surfde22]

Okay thanks. We signed up in September. So there’s definitely something going on. There were lots of people scared to attend but hard to believe that big of a difference

While yes attendance may be up this year due to Covid mostly calming, you also have to consider other factors this year that weren’t there last year. It’s the 30th marathon, 10th Dopey, and a retro 90s theme that have a lot of millennials that grew up on Disney in that time excited and nostalgic. The demand was going to be way up this year no matter what.

 

[Barca33Runner]

For posterity:

I had a tab open on Chrome and a tab open on Edge at 9:45. I added a tab each at 10am.

At 12:30pm., those original tabs were still in queue with the message to stay put, but I also opened a fresh tab in Edge right at 12:30.

Wanna guess which opened first? Yep, the fresh 12:30 one. The others weren't terribly far behind, but still: the ones that rD said to stick with were behind the brand new one. That bothers me a lot.

Similar experience. I had 4 tabs (3 on Mac- Safari, Chrome, Edge) + 1 on iPad. All opened around 9:45.

Once everyone started reporting the 7 Dwarfs I opened a Safari Private browsing tab. I finally got into a queue on that tab sometime after 11 (I don't have the exact time but its when everyone who had the 7 dwarfs page were finally able to get into the queue). When the countdown finally started, it gave me a 4 minute wait. I was able to complete my registration (which took a while as I'd forgotten to enable pop up windows). When I was done, all my other tabs were still at 50+ minutes.

FWIW I'm pretty sure this happened to me last year too - the tabs I opened before 10am were slower than the one I opened at 10.

This is exactly the problem that caused the crash. The queue system they have set up does not operate on a first in, first out basis. I don’t know how or why they would have such a system, but they do. Everyone knows the queue system is completely unpredictable. So opening one browser doesn’t guarantee their spot in line. Therefore, it is incentivized for everyone to open multiple browsers to increase their lottery chances and the system gets overloaded.

It’s absolute madness that rD continues with this system but they got all the money today so they don’t care.

 

[fatmanatee]

Also keep in mind that Marathon Weekend has a big international draw. Last year there were still a lot of travel restrictions in place, which would only increase international demand now that things are normalizing along with the extra draws of the anniversaries and theming.

This is a really good point.

 

[SarahDisney]

Response: “Hmmm… Do you have anything to do with Disney+? No. Why would you think you get any money?”

In all seriousness ... I've known people who worked for Disney Streaming Services. It's a whole different world than the rest of Disney (tech-wise at least).

Does anyone have IT experience? Is it possible to have a temporary boost in servers or IT resources if there's only a few days a year with massive demand? Or is that unrealistic?

I'm engineering, not IT, but close enough, so I guess I can share my experience here. Depending on how your system is built, it could be very easy or it could be impossible. There are cloud providers that allow you to scale up and down based on demand (AWS and GCP are two of the more popular ones). If Disney has their own physical servers (which I believe is what Facebook does), it's less easy. So ... yes, it's possible, but runDisney may not be set up for that (I'm 99% sure that Disney+ is on AWS so they can do it more easily)

This part was a little shocking to me. I admit, I don’t know anything about IT and whatever it entails, but I thought it was strange it took so long for it to get figured out. Like, they didn’t have any solutions if things got backed up? Were they that confident everything would go smoothly and they were caught off guard?? Who knows.

The solution may have been to take down the website to troubleshoot. Sometimes that's the easiest way.
My company's policy when something breaks is usually to roll back to the last stable version while we find the issue and fix it. That works more for new features and bugs than for server issues, but it is possible that when they couldn't immediately identify what was wrong, they decided to just keep it down until they had a good fix.

Alive, yes, but relatively sane implies that we were to begin with...

Hence the term "relatively" ... relative to what we were before.


Congrats to all those who got in today! Sounds like it was a crazy day. I'm definitely feeling some FOMO over missing Chip n Dale but glad I didn't have to deal with the registration chaos.
I would love to be in the post-mortem for this (if they do post-mortems; with the way Disney tech is sometimes, I'm not sure figuring things out after the fact is high on their priority list). I'm so curious about what actually happened and what they did to fix it.

 

[Donna3271]

I got in at 1:07 pm after being in the queue since 9:41 am. I had to register myself and my friend and I have never typed so fast in my life once I actually got in! I am happy I got the Half as that is what we wanted but sad that it looks like those who logged on early were bumped to the end of the line. I would have thought for sure my 9:41 screen would have gotten me to the registration page first but it kept saying more than an hour wait and never got me there. My Firefox screen got me there in total 37 minutes.

Molly,
I am LOL'ing at your comment! I was sweating bullets typing! I had Chrome and safari open on my Mac, and the safari opened first.

 

[fatmanatee]

This is exactly the problem that caused the crash. The queue system they have set up does not operate on a first in, first out basis. I don’t know how or why they would have such a system, but they do. Everyone knows the queue system is completely unpredictable. So opening one browser doesn’t guarantee their spot in line. Therefore, it is incentivized for everyone to open multiple browsers to increase their lottery chances and the system gets overloaded.

It’s absolute madness that rD continues with this system but they got all the money today so they don’t care.

Yep, I didn’t want to mention it because I don’t think anyone here should feel guilty for working with the system they have, but it’s possible they had over 100k “people” hitting the website at the same time. Ticketmaster, which is supposed to be able to handle this stuff, still crashes all the time from the same sort of activity.

I’m not sure what the answer is. A lottery system isn’t quite it, because unlike something like the NYC Marathon, where you’re only trying to register yourself for one race, in this case you have people registering their families for different events. And it def seems like something Disney IT would screw up.

Maybe they can set it up so you log in to one browser and that’s your token to get into the queue. Everyone has the same shot at getting through.

 

[Donna3271]

Everyone.... This may have been stated in the thread, but remember more spots opened in the fall? Don't be disheartened!

 

[camaker]

This is exactly the problem that caused the crash. The queue system they have set up does not operate on a first in, first out basis. I don’t know how or why they would have such a system, but they do. Everyone knows the queue system is completely unpredictable. So opening one browser doesn’t guarantee their spot in line. Therefore, it is incentivized for everyone to open multiple browsers to increase their lottery chances and the system gets overloaded.

It’s absolute madness that rD continues with this system but they got all the money today so they don’t care.

I could be wrong, but I think it's first in, first out once the opening time for the event/registration hits. It's only random when people go into the waiting room prior to opening. It's not like showing up and camping out in line at Best Buy the night before a launch. I think it may seem random for those that hit right at opening, too, as the system has thousands of people hit essentially simultaneously and the system has to place them in some sort of order.

 

[camaker]

Everyone.... This may have been stated in the thread, but remember more spots opened in the fall? Don't be disheartened!

Typically, the only way more spots open up is:

1. Initial registration was limited due to COVID and they decided to release more as conditions allowed. There's no indication of that being the case here.
2. Unsold Dopey bibs are split into their component registrations. There's nothing to split after the sell-out today.
3. Charities return unsold bibs to RunDisney. Charities look like they're being inundated with requests right now. They're unlikely to need to return bibs.

There could always be some onesies or twosies to pop up here and there, but I wouldn't expect a significant number of bibs to come available.

 

[Barca33Runner]

I could be wrong, but I think it's first in, first out once the opening time for the event/registration hits. It's only random when people go into the waiting room prior to opening. It's not like showing up and camping out in line at Best Buy the night before a launch. I think it may seem random for those that hit right at opening, too, as the system has thousands of people hit essentially simultaneously and the system has to place them in some sort of order.

Yeah, from anecdotal evidence it definitely appears people hitting the registration just as the actual registration time hits get in more quickly. I’m guessing that all of the pre-queues essentially are entered when they auto-refresh after registration is officially live, which probably leaves them subject to a 5-10 second window when their queue hasn’t refreshed. ETA: If you’re lucky your refresh will occur right on time and you’ll have little wait; unlucky and you’ll refresh a second before registration is live and your next refresh leaves you over an hour and lamenting your life decisions.

All of which begs the question, why even have a queue system open before registration is live? If they just didn’t activate those links until the system was live there would be no need or desire to open multiple browsers.

 

[Disney at Heart]

Oh no, you remember perfectly lolol! I ran this morning and it felt good, so yeah - back to the marathon! I'm sure I'll regret that in August...

Despite my swearing that I would never do another marathon, I signed up for Goofy. Like you, @PrincessV, I will regret that in August or maybe sooner!

How did it happen?
DH got into Goofy with his Perfect link days ago, and I wasn't sure what race(s) to do. I had to join the chaos that was registration today. We each signed into my account on separate computers, and I also signed in on my phone at about 9:40. We waited, saw dwarves, saw spinning things, saw runDisney's non-updates every 15 minutes, and I started reading all of your comments, jokes, and sarcasms, looked at the "new tee shirt design," and laughed for a couple of hours. It really made the time pass more quickly! Thanks for that! Finally I got in and said, "Goofy!" I know I should have stuck to the half, but I'm not known for rational thought on registration day!

 

[luv2cheer92]

Stressful day at work, and all of this didn't help. But I got me and my dad in for Dopey!!

 

[shellott-hill]

My guess is they open the "waiting room" so as to try and take some of the load off the servers when 10am rolls around.

I am wondering if it wasn't the webpage that was the problem but maybe a database corruption. Having to rebuild the queue database and people ending up in an order that does not seem to make sense may be attributed to populating a new database with the corrupted data?

 

[steph0808]

I am pretty sure that I got in with my first window. I opened one in Chrome and one in Edge around 9:50 before everything crashed. Saw dwarves for hours, then finally got another window to open on my phone and one incognito. My first one said an hour, then 49 minutes, then basically counted down from 29 minutes. None of the later queues moved faster or got me in earlier.

Going back through this thread and my email, I finished registration at 1:01pm ET and Z knight posted about Dopey being sold out at 1:08.

 

[Kitty-chan]

I'm engineering, not IT, but close enough, so I guess I can share my experience here. Depending on how your system is built, it could be very easy or it could be impossible. There are cloud providers that allow you to scale up and down based on demand (AWS and GCP are two of the more popular ones). If Disney has their own physical servers (which I believe is what Facebook does), it's less easy. So ... yes, it's possible, but runDisney may not be set up for that (I'm 99% sure that Disney+ is on AWS so they can do it more easily)

Just ran this for fun, which seems to confirm they're on AWS:

C:\WINDOWS\system32>tracert rundisney.com

Tracing route to rundisney.com [13.249.187.126]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms 192.168.0.1
2 8 ms 9 ms 9 ms bdl1.abr-cbr1.sbo-abr.ma.cable.rcn.net [10.18.208.1]
3 11 ms 10 ms 10 ms bdle6-sub211.aggr1.sth.ma.rcn.net [146.115.22.203]
4 15 ms 10 ms 10 ms hge0-0-0-12.core1.bos.ma.rcn.net [207.172.18.95]
5 14 ms 9 ms 10 ms hge0-0-0-0.border1.bos.ma.rcn.net [207.172.19.53]
6 10 ms 8 ms 14 ms 52.95.219.198
7 26 ms 15 ms 14 ms 52.93.76.118
8 24 ms 10 ms 10 ms 150.222.71.81
9 * * * Request timed out.
10 * * * Request timed out.
11 * * * Request timed out.
12 * * * Request timed out.
13 * * * Request timed out.
14 9 ms 11 ms 15 ms server-13-249-187-126.bos50.r.cloudfront.net [13.249.187.126]

Trace complete.

 

[Barca33Runner]

In all seriousness ... I've known people who worked for Disney Streaming Services. It's a whole different world than the rest of Disney (tech-wise at least).

I was commenting primarily on the hyper-focus that Chapek has on Disney+ and it’s effect on the stock price. From the outside there appears to be very little that is getting anywhere close to proper support or funding, at least from a corporate level, if it isn’t driving Disney+ subscriptions.

 

[Donna3271]

Typically, the only way more spots open up is:

1. Initial registration was limited due to COVID and they decided to release more as conditions allowed. There's no indication of that being the case here.
2. Unsold Dopey bibs are split into their component registrations. There's nothing to split after the sell-out today.
3. Charities return unsold bibs to RunDisney. Charities look like they're being inundated with requests right now. They're unlikely to need to return bibs.

There could always be some onesies or twosies to pop up here and there, but I wouldn't expect a significant number of bibs to come available.

Ahhh... I did not think of these..... especially #1. People at our charity fight for bibs. I am so glad I was able to register! Glad I hung in there!