I am referring to the Cydia store by @saurik.
That doesn't mean, however, that I should be expected to perform miracles. I already work nearly every waking hour on things related to jailbreaking: "I'm giving er' all she's got, captain". For the record, by the way, here is what I'm up against today:
http://cache.saurik.com/tinyimg/cydia6hits.png
The game is also really difficult to predict. In this case, this is unlike any previous jailbreak, because they announced a specific time. I was not expecting them to announce a time: they have never announced a time before. I was not prepared for them to announce a specific time. What normally happens is there is a massive wave over the first few days while people find out about the jailbreak. Today, there were people watching a progress bar for hours until it hit 100%.
Meanwhile, you make it sound like it is really simple to take a payment transaction and licensing system, and just go "oh wow, we are doing over 10x the load? flip the switch boys!"... payment systems just don't work like that: this isn't some stupid web forum where you can play fast and loose with consistency (or even durability) to get more performance.
Also, six months to prepare? Seriously: you think I should spend six months while Cydia is losing money and there are no jailbreaks available--and there may never be a jailbreak available again--sitting around figuring out how to make a payment system scale infinitely so that during a small multi-hour long window it can shine?
Even in jailbreak-land, that is not the most important thing to be doing; one of my big time sinks this last half year was figuring out how to better deal with credit card fraud, for example. Leaving the world of payments, vendors are happier with more backend features, developers are happier with more Substrate improvements, and end users would prefer I make more tweaks or add things to WinterBoard.
You do great work, don't let the few smaller complainers get to you.
The repos are still, of course, slammed. Keep in mind that there's no money in hosting one AFIK. Who's gonna pay for ramping up more servers? Can you even easily do that with Cydia or would it require a lot of hacking on code that mostly works well enough?
I think anyone aware enough to be jailbreaking the first day the jailbreak is out is also aware enough to know that a royal fuckton of other people are also jailbreaking, and that if they can chill out for just a couple more days then they'll be able to load up all their favorite tweaks.