Hi,
Silly question, but just for fun (maybe someone asked it before but your search engine did not return anything) :

You have 2 members, member A and member B, bidding on the same item. They both set their max bid at say, 30$, and both are at 5 seconds. How do you set wich one wins? (Naturally, assuming that it's the highest bid).
Will the server make a choice alpahbetically, giving priority to member A? Or is the server old style and gives priority to member B because she's a woman? Or will it give priority to the older member and if so, will it use the actual age of the member or his time as member? Or will it choose the one that was the first to set his snipe? Or will the server toss a coin? And if it does, will it use american or canadian coins? Or if in the end it doesn't matter anymore, as the 5 seconds are over and nobody won!!!
Like I said, just for fun. It's gonna be hard to give a serious answer to that question, won't it?

The non-serious answer: American coins work better for some reasons. I get tails more often when using Canadian coins. Is it because I don't speak French?
I bet someone who speaks French (or knows a few words at least) will get better results with Canadian coins.

The serious answer is: the sniper does not decide and does not give any priorities. Both snipes will fire at the same time. eBay will decide the outcome, so whatever bid is accepted first, that person wins.
This is the reason why I always recommend to add a few extra cents to cover up similar situations. Put $30.02 instead of $30.00.

Sashka wrote:
Both snipes will fire at the same time

I'm curious as to what is meant by this. Assuming the sniping is done by the same machine then how is this possible? All actions, at any level, must be acting sequentially.

If there are multiple processors/machines involved then are these 'potentially clashing' snipes allocated across the different instances in order to avoid a single-processor collision?

Mathew

You are talking about atomic processes, but snipe is a complicated process and contains several steps.
Each snipe is a process. Any modern OS can do several processes pseudo-parallel even with single CPU core, so you should not take it into consideration even.
What you should consider is that each snipe may land on different eBay servers in different networks and the network and processing lag may add up into the process.
That's why two snipes can go together with no problems and it's up to eBay whatever will be counted as the first one.

You get more tails with Canadian coins because Canadians get more tail....