Whiskers the Wonder Cat
12-08-2005, 04:17 PM
Ah, it now tells me it has been sold. What's up with the 20 minutes delay?
Kitsune Sniper
12-08-2005, 04:24 PM
Are you sure you're just not experiencing some random error? I sometimes have problems while browsing eBay; I've bid on items, and sometimes the bids won't show up on searches, but they do on the items themselves. It happens!
The cause for this is a very basic problem experienced by virtually every database administrator that operates a site as large as eBay.
Basically, if eBay were to give you the current up-to-the-minute results in every search, it'd put a tremendous load on the database with each search. Add this up across thousands of users searching at any one time, and you've got some pretty hefty database load.
Instead, every so often (I'd guess at 10 or 20 minute intervals) eBay automatically indexes every auction into a sort of 'static' database that can then be searched very quickly. The downside to this is that the search results aren't accurate to the second, but it speeds everything up and helps minimize the effect of Denial of Service attacks. (The first rule of any DOS attack is to make your target do as much work as possible with the smallest query available.)
Of course, the auction pages themselves are designed to be as accurate as possible. Don't forget to hold down 'shift' while reloading a page, as it forces a complete reload of the page without relying on any cache from your browser at all.
The only explanation I have for the 'disappearing' sold auction is that eBay probably has a queue to move auctions from an 'in progress' database to a 'closed auctions' database. If the 'closed auctions' database is very busy, the queue of auctions moving from one to the other may fill. As the load lessens, the queue empties faster.
This is all academic, though. I'm only talking from my own experience. eBay may have things setup differently, but these are plausable explanations.
-RS.