IR Tanks and Side Bets

Wow, what's up with all of the negative comments? These guys are trying to do something nice for their customer base, and all of the "know-it-alls" come in to rain on their parade?
Here's a hint: if you know enough to know about effective load-balancing and spike handling strategies, you should also know enough to start with the presumption that someone there is at least as smart as you.
Then, if the presumption proves wrong, you can get your smarter-than-thou rocks off by jumping on the "any idiot could've seen that coming," bandwagon, and only appear half the smart-a.. you do now.
!c

I really hope that you've given your ISP warning about this event. (I am sure they appreciate that you are waiting until after the holiday rush to do this.)
Without knowing the network architecture...i suspect that the bottleneck will be with the load-balancer. (OH, how i hope it is a high end F5 or Citrix with licensing for a LOT of connections)

Why not give a $100 discount for orders over $150? My orders here regularly go over $100 anyways. If I end up not getting the credit I might just forget about the order altogether since the items are closely related.

It's anybody's guess. Those that have done the cold math could be right but they're assuming that there's only a thousand people clicking 'buy'. I expect there'll be a few more than that which will possibly draw the whole process out.
1st guess: 09:01:15
2nd guess: 09:27:30
Marcel

I can't wait I'm staying up all night... oh wait I have to! its my job.

Free Day Guess: 09:37:00

I'm going to buck the trend of the "experts" out there and say that everything will come off fine. Sparkfun is "paying it back" to their customer base and as such positive karma will come into play. In these days of "spit on your customer" sorts of mega-corporations who only pay lip service to customer service and the whole "customer experience" I applaud Sparkfun going their own way.
As for the, er, cynics suggesting changes to the plan in order to get something even if catastrophe strikes - I will also buck that trend, I want the stuff whether I get it free or not! I want Sparkfun to still be here next year so I'm not going to complain if I actually have to pay for it!
You go guys!
DLC

I'll guess Free Day will end at 9:05am MST

I'll guess free day will end at 9:01:00AM

Doing the math:
1. Assume an order, to get to the free day confirmation screen, takes 100KB of data on average.
2. Assume every single person who gets it uses their whole $100 - that's 1000 people.
3. Assume that 1000 people are watching their clocks with their fingers (or their scripts) on the trigger
4. Assume that those 1000 people have infinite bandwidth/zero latency connections.
5. Assume the sparkfun line spikes to 100mbit as you say it can.
The contest can end within 8 seconds.
I submitted my guess, though I pushed it up a bit higher to take lag, human error, etc. into consideration.

EricWertz: It'll be over when the order system seizes-up -- T+8min.
Lets be blunt, there will be over 1,000 users sitting on their computer, waiting for the clock to cycle over to 9 am before they click, so freeday will end as soon as it starts :)

I agree with shutterdrone - this is great and I'm so grateful. Besides, they stated this a chance to stretch the legs of their new server cluster - we are their Perf test team (and while perf testing doesn't usually cost 100k, it sure is a cool way to do it).
@Rich - shhhhhh - you told people?! The less that know the more chance there for us.
Sidenote: I got my Getting Started with Arduino book in the mail today and promptly ordered my first Duemilanove. Looking forward to free day to grab some extras!

This is a totally awesome idea, but I can already smell the bits burning from here. Think of the scale of this event: I tell two friends, and they each tell two friends, etc. In just 10 hops, you're up to 1024 customers. There were 280 viewers listening to Nate on the AdaFruit chat last week, so if each of us talked to only two other people, then that limit has been reached.
Suggestion for next year: Order item "X" and get an equal value off of item "Y". This would result in a small profit for SparkFun, plus would weed eliminate those who will only register because they want something for nothing.

can we get a count down clock? or maybe a way to sync our home pc with your rig? peoples clocks might be off from yours by a few seconds, and it seems that it wont be much longer than a minute

I predict with in 60 seconds one of two things will happen:
1. Your servers will start failing to server some requests, but a few manage to get through and a few lucky people will land some free stuff. While your site is effectively down for 2-3 hours. This is fairly common behavior for a PHP/Apache stack. (best case)
2. Your server falls over miserably before 9am due to load.
So can the bet be when your server will fall down the first time OR the orders fulfilled. Because I'm thinking 8:45am.

"It would also be cool to see the geographic distribution of the Free Day recipients. (Nothing fancy - a Google Maps mashup loaded with the 1,000 Zip/Postal Codes & Countries of the 'winners' would do the trick.)"
Sounds like a cool idea too...

It'll be over when the order system seizes-up -- T+8min.

I think you're underestimating the power of the internet. Did you hear about when the codeweavers "lame duck challenge" was fulfilled? They had a $70 piece of software they offered for free.
They opened the floodgates and let people start downloading at 11pm (an hour before they said they were going to let it happen), just to test the waters for how bad the server strain would be. They purportedly didn't start panicking until they hit something like 1,000 requests a second for the free software. And that wasn't even for physical stuff! It was just a download! $100 per person is going to bring the server to its KNEES.
If I were you guys? I would plan to have a hyper-minimalistic interface ready for free day. It's every web administrator's worst nightmare, even if it only lasts 10 seconds. People will be pounding the servers for the rest of the day, even if the money is long gone!
Good luck you guys, this sounds like it's going to be awesome! Hope I can manage to get in on some of this :)

Step 1: register 36000 accts.
Step 2: post a guess from each acct for
every second from 9AM till 7pm.
Step 3: profit ...
ack, ignore this message, off to go register email accts with 10000 different domains ...
;->

Awesome idea on the side game stats, crwper. It would also be cool to see the geographic distribution of the Free Day recipients. (Nothing fancy - a Google Maps mashup loaded with the 1,000 Zip/Postal Codes & Countries of the 'winners' would do the trick.)
Sparkfun ppl - you guys are definitely getting people excited! Great job on making it a lot of fun to source parts!
Barrett

I'm a bit of a data junkie, and would love to see the distribution of guess times (raw data if possible) once the competition is over.

fail...not even a mention :)...i was there with my bot designed for robojoust, even though the competition was a bust...details are @ http://www.robotdialogs.com

I haven't noticed any slowing of the site today.

Yeah, after the behavior of the site today, I'm thinking a better plan might be a more modest overall discount on all orders that day with an order size limit per order with the same one order on that day limit per household.
At least then you get the orders period instead of having people cancel orders because they miss out.

What time does the free-buying start, is it midnight 1-6-2010?

Even on the wrong day, the website slowed down to a crawl. Did you upgrade your servers yet?
In addition, your comments seem to be 20 minutes off from actual time. Can you please correct this?
Thanks!