[Gllug] Oyster cards vulnerable?

[Nix]

On 30 Jan 2008, t. clarke uttered the following:

> This may be a silly question,  but do the card readers at the stations need to
> consult some central server every time a Oyster card is 'swiped'?

The station ones, yes.

> If so this could well account for the differences in experiences; depending on
> when and where you swipe !

Also perhaps depending on time of day: I heard rumours of server
capacity problems after the Oyster rollout (perhaps it was more popular
than they thought, or the cards got used more).

It's definitely much faster than it used to be (and obviously any
statistical study they did pre-rollout would have been with an unloaded
system).

I'm not sure how much location matters: we can rule out signal travel
time as a factor, but perhaps they prioritize requests from known-busy
stations (or even sort stations dynamically by number-of-recent-requests
and prioritize future requests from the stations ranked as busiest).

(This is rank speculation.)

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