What are the odds of me getting a poseidon coin tonight?

Once again a bit of transparency/communication from them would have been much appreciated. Why not tell potential buyers that there was only 300 being allocated to the online shop?
I'm sure many people who stayed up all night wouldn't have bothered doing so if they knew that their chances of getting one were a fifth of what they were led to believe.

Didn't they promise to fix the website after it crashed many times during the dragon frenzy? Pretty sure more people would have logged on for that.
 
Does anyone know what you have to do to qualify as a distributor? Eg shop/ABN? I wonder do they limit the amount of distributors...
 
Bit Baron said:
This was a sham all along.

The Perth Mint never mentioned to the public before midnight that even if you added the coin to your cart, paid for the coin using a credit card that you would still need to wait an undefined amount of time before knowing if you had won the opportunity to take possession of the item you just paid for.

For any other business this would be considered dishonest and possibly illegal.
Click to expand...

My CC had a .93 cent authorization charge on it from the Perth mint, it is still on there...says pending.

So I would say, that's about as far along on an order as you can get. :|
 
Kordarg said:
Silva-Sheep said:
http://blog.perthmint.com.au
Click to expand...
If the corner shop ran a website that couldn't handle 500 simultaneous users placing orders, I'd think they were a bit clueless... but for a company that has a pre-tax profit in the region of $36 million... wow... just, wow.
Click to expand...

From informal discussions I've had with an in-the-know mint employee in the past, it's not so much the website that's the problem as the much larger back end system it integrates with that causes the bottlenecks and the slowdown in order processing. From a business and architectural point of view it's a *much* more complicated problem than just cranking up the memory and number of web server threads to solve.

But from the users point of view, yes, their website can't handle the load. The technicalities of why are irrelevant.
 
goldpelican said:
From informal discussions I've had with an in-the-know mint employee in the past, it's not so much the website that's the problem as the much larger back end system it integrates with that causes the bottlenecks and the slowdown in order processing.
Click to expand...

The entire site effectively ground to a halt, not just the order processing. Without even logging in, loading a page became impossible. Even the error page would take over 5 minutes to appear. If there's no problem with their website, yet it was crippled like that, it strongly suggests they've got their entire system (front and back-end) on a single machine... surely they couldn't be that incompetent. As you say, the technicalities of why it happened are irrelevant. However, those technicalities also reveal a lot about the priorities and competence of Perth Mint... okay, still largely irrelevant, but perhaps interesting? :)

Any commercial system with a requirement to handle occasional spikes in traffic should be hosted on a load-balanced system capable of handling those spikes... unless the company thinks events such as the Poseidon release, are acceptable. From what I've found regarding the Perth Mint servers, it seems to be a single co-located server at a single data centre. It's hosted by a jack-of-many-trades service provider, not a dedicated hosting company. Nothing wrong with that, per se, but is it appropriate? By comparison, dedicated hosting services capable of handling tens of thousands of concurrent users and load-balanced across multiple continents, are readily available for under $1000 per month.

Now, we know that the "spike" Perth Mint experienced was in the realms of 500-1000 concurrent users. That's absolutely ridiculous for a company with their resources. Being crippled by "spikes in traffic" usually entails many thousands of concurrent users, not hundreds. I've built servers capable of handling a few thousand concurrent users from components at the local computer shop. Hosting a commercial site such as Perth Mint is a obviously a much bigger task, but my point is, their current system is near the bottom end of performance levels and not even close to mid-levels. Given their $36 million in pre-tax profit, you'd think they could spent a bit more on systems development, especially since they've know about traffic spike problems for a number of years.

Bottom line is, the problem could have been fixed years ago, but Perth Mint chose not to fix it. I'm very biased here... but the technical guys at Perth Mint are probably not to blame. It's most likely a case of management not providing them the resources to fix the problems. The tech guys have probably been screaming out for resources for years, and are just as frustrated by what happened, as we are. Hopefully yesterday, they got to point fingers at the bean counters and say, "See! We told you this would happen!" :P
 
Kordarg said:
goldpelican said:
From informal discussions I've had with an in-the-know mint employee in the past, it's not so much the website that's the problem as the much larger back end system it integrates with that causes the bottlenecks and the slowdown in order processing.
Click to expand...

The entire site effectively ground to a halt, not just the order processing. Without even logging in, loading a page became impossible. Even the error page would take over 5 minutes to appear. If there's no problem with their website, yet it was crippled like that, it strongly suggests they've got their entire system (front and back-end) on a single machine... surely they couldn't be that incompetent. As you say, the technicalities of why it happened are irrelevant. However, those technicalities also reveal a lot about the priorities and competence of Perth Mint... okay, still largely irrelevant, but perhaps interesting? :)

Any commercial system with a requirement to handle occasional spikes in traffic should be hosted on a load-balanced system capable of handling those spikes...
Click to expand...

Not my place to explain their enterprise systems, but I think your definition of back end and mine are slightly different. I spent well over a decade designing such things. The problem isn't in the "single machine" order of magnitude, and a slow website experience isn't necessarily reflective of more front end web server resources being required.

I worked as an architect on two of the big four banks' current retail web solutions. I have a slight understanding of what's going on.

Regardless, it results in a crap experience for their customers and the mint is very aware of the shortcomings of their website during popular releases.
 
bloomst said:
Did someone tell you that Perth Mint is State Gov owned?
Click to expand...

Oh, yeah. I did actually forget about that. Thanks for reminding me. Though, as far as I know (not much), government-owned means they basically operate as a company. As in, they don't get assigned government funds and therefore don't have to get government approval for expenditure.

I should also point out that all the Perth Mint staff I've spoken to have been great to deal with and as helpful as possible. Even late yesterday, after they'd obviously been getting hammered all day by irate customers. I really felt sorry for those guys, as anyone at Perth Mint picking up the phone would have nothing to do with what happened to us, but I bet they copped a load of flak about it.
 
goldpelican said:
Kordarg said:
goldpelican said:
From informal discussions I've had with an in-the-know mint employee in the past, it's not so much the website that's the problem as the much larger back end system it integrates with that causes the bottlenecks and the slowdown in order processing.
Click to expand...

The entire site effectively ground to a halt, not just the order processing. Without even logging in, loading a page became impossible. Even the error page would take over 5 minutes to appear. If there's no problem with their website, yet it was crippled like that, it strongly suggests they've got their entire system (front and back-end) on a single machine... surely they couldn't be that incompetent. As you say, the technicalities of why it happened are irrelevant. However, those technicalities also reveal a lot about the priorities and competence of Perth Mint... okay, still largely irrelevant, but perhaps interesting? :)

Any commercial system with a requirement to handle occasional spikes in traffic should be hosted on a load-balanced system capable of handling those spikes...
Click to expand...

Not my place to explain their enterprise systems, but I think your definition of back end and mine are slightly different. I spent well over a decade designing such things. The problem isn't in the "single machine" order of magnitude, and a slow website experience isn't necessarily reflective of more front end web server resources being required.

I worked as an architect on two of the big four banks' current retail web solutions. I have a slight understanding of what's going on.

Regardless, it results in a crap experience for their customers and the mint is very aware of the shortcomings of their website during popular releases.
Click to expand...

GP, you might want to copy/paste that when Perth Mint released the Lunar Proof...lol.
 
Silva-Sheep said:
I saw something on Newcastle coins today?!?... 2 things in fact... One starts with Z; the other P.
Click to expand...

Tried them before I saw this, had taken the credit card payment and received a receipt but got an email the following day saying they weren't actually in stock :/

R4mn33k- according to the PM website there's a short delay in delivery of these; "Orders will be fulfilled in order of purchase by 16 June 2014."
 
Hi,

We have been informed by the Perth Mint of a delay to their scheduled delivery. They have told us that the delay will be minimal and we expect any issues to be resolved by early next week. Once we get our stock from Perth Mint we will begin shipping to clients.

Kind regards,

Renee
 
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