So please don't take any of this as just trying to smack AS around a bit. I like what they've done, and they seem pretty responsive to issues. However, everybody's got an opinion, and I'm no different
In any case.... even *86,400* per day is one a second, which is easy for any halfway decent machine with a halfway decent network connection (I've programmed that sort of thing from my three-year old laptop).
What's more important is the peak busy period. Are all those thousands bunching up in groups? That would make the effective snipes per day much higher. We don't know, but AS does, or they should.
In any case, with so *few* snipes per day, I'd have to say something's going on. In any case, if *I* worked at AS, I'd be tearing out the circuit boards and going through logs to find out what happened
Especially if they're running a Windows O/S... Then I'd probably reboot each server just before the busy period!
So anyway, if we give AS the benifit of the doubt, then Sunday something unusual happened on eBay, something that AS hasn't yet compensated for. One hopes that AS will study the issue and attempt to engineer an even better algorithm. It's through our failures that we learn!