A journey from simple curiosity to 977 tickets per second
TigerFans demo showing ticket checkout and payment flow
What Started Everything
”Too easy: TigerBeetle.”
That was Joran Dirk Greef’s response when someone on Twitter asked how you’d build a ticketing solution for an Oasis-scale concert—hundreds of thousands of people flooding your website at once, where you need to guarantee no ticket gets sold twice and everyone who pays gets a ticket. Joran is the CEO and founder of TigerBeetle.
He was right. Everyone who knows TigerBeetle would give the same advice. TigerBeetle is a financial transactions database designed for exactly this kind of problem: counting resources with absolute correctness under extreme load.
But I wanted to understand the concrete implementation. Not just conceptually—I needed to see the actual code.
How do you model ticket transactions as financial transactions? What does the account structure look like? How do the transfers flow through a realistic booking system with payment providers? What about pending reservations that timeout? What about idempotency when webhooks retry?
The best way to learn: build it myself.
So I built it. Three days later, I had a working demo. What started as an educational project became a 19-day optimization journey that pushed the system to 977 ticket reservations per second—15x faster than the Oasis baseline . All in Python.
... continue reading