The Daytona 500 was billed by Iracing to be a huge event for serious sim racers. Instead, it was a huge disappointment to Iracing customers. At 7:00 PM EST, Iracing servers completely crashed. No one could even access the site. How did this happen? We saw over 1300 drivers waiting to access the race server prior to the crash.
One would have thought that Iracing would have had a plan in place to handle the increased demand on the servers for "the big event". Instead, in true Iracing fashion, they underestimated the bandwidth demand on their servers. Iracing's Tony Gardner posted a message in the Iracing forums stating that: "the number connections exceeded what was configured. Systems were configured along the network path to contend with a large number of connections however we had a system that failed and therefore had its configuration exceed capacity. It is third-party software with few hooks for monitoring resource usage. We did our best to infer usage and had over configured the limits by a factor of three."
You know, I'm just a dumb country boy.......but it would seem like Iracing would have limited the number of connections to prevent the server from crashing! They say that they configured the limits by a factor of three.....great! What was that factor? If it was 1000 users, Iracing should have capped the number of people who could sign up to race by that number! Instead, they allowed an unlimited number of users to connect, and CRASH!
We could cut Iracing a break, if their lack of planning were an isolated case. Unfortunately, this is a continuation of a pattern of mismanagement by Iracing staff members. Its a slap in the face of the people who have invested a lot of time and money in Iracing, and we plan to be there every time they screw up, to call them out, and hold them accountable.
