I was wondering why the
http://lotto.coinworld.us/IFC/
was down. I'll add another million to the bet
Infinite Coin was added by a user's request later in the week.
When we started this site a few days ago, I wasn't really planning for multi-million coin drawings right away.
I also didn't realize that the memory settings were so tight on these servers.
I can use reservation IDs to generate the tickets and probably cut the required memory by 2/3 or more in a drawing with a small number of reservations, too. In this case that would have just barely saved it.
So, I know what the restrictions are now we'll sort something out. But if I don't put it into an array it's hard to do something like shuffle(). At this time the drawing procedure is shuffle, random selection, delete selected ticket, repeat.
I like the two stage process - it resembles shuffling some balls or tickets in a cage and then drawing one each time. And even if some salting factor or quirk of rand would select tickets in a cluster, the shuffle offsets the chances.
There's also the option of moving to using some temp tables in a DB or something. But it seems like that would be time consuming, at least.
I'm open to any suggestions for sure.