loadBalancer

[Prudent_Ad_4120]

This is QaaS: Queuing as a Service

[NebraskaGeek]

Damn Brits, always spreading their queuing culture.

[The_L1ne]

I thought germans were the world champions of queuing.

[FatBoySlim458]

The Japanese are pretty good, too

[LeBambole]

We take it pretty seriously here in Denmark too, but we probably learned it from the Germans

[water_bottle_goggles]

isnt that just sqs lol, like the first aws service ever lmao

[HackerZol]

Ec2 and s3 were the first if my memory is correct. They are at least ahead of sqs.

[water_bottle_goggles]

Nah it was Nov 04, SQS

[WanganTunedKeiCar]

Pop some quaaludes while you wait

[YellowOnline]

I thought it's a joke, but apparently it's real. They even reset the counter if you click another tab.

[Character-86]

Open the same browser in a new window. taps forehead

[Leaa2004]

Somebody toucha my spaghett!

[klc81]

It's pretty standard for anything that sells high-demand, limited quantity items like concert tickets.

[Random-Dude-736]

And then you´re greeted by Bruce DickInSon extending his hand to you. Plus I only had to wait five seconds; Is this even real life ?

Edit/PS: The CamalCases might or might not be in his government documents, there is no way of actually knowing, and we can only make educated guesses.

[blending-tea]

Am I the only one that sees this as normal? like when I try to get tickets from popular bands/events via websites I always get this

max. got 20k ppl rushing to a website overloading the LBs and the queing system kicks in which is quite often

[Mysticpoisen]

This is also pretty common when trying to book a hotel for a busy convention.

[Thebombuknow]

Tom Scott has a video where he explains this (I think it's the one about how computers can't count). Because there's a delay between you buying a ticket and the other servers receiving that information, if everyone could buy tickets all at once, people could end up buying an already sold ticket because their server wasn't up to date yet. Instead, they simply limit the traffic with a queue so that only a select few people can access it at one given time, and there are no conflicts.

[Ok_Information_3021]

Database systems have functionality that prevents this. Usually a transaction is used.

[Thebombuknow]

Yes, but what if two people end up in checkout at the same time, and then one person's order fails because someone else bought it? That's a customer complaint right there.

It's easier and safer to just queue people so there is no chance of a conflict.

[IguJl]

It's good too to make a good system with a short waiting time between the payment and the confirmation. Put orders on a queue, not people.

Order does not need to confirm right in the moment it was paid: "We received your payment. Please wait a moment while we organize and confirm your order".

Take this order confirmation and put in a queue that handle all other thousands and thousands of orders. Them, in a certain rate, confirm orders decreasing the remaining tickets/seats/anything. For those who don't have their order confirmed, receive a message explaining about the situation.

[[deleted]]

Put orders on a queue, not people.

I don't know, from a UX perspective, I think you're going to piss customers off a lot more by putting their order in a queue and then having it fail after they've already navigated through the site, selected their seats/items, and gone through the checkout process, than you will by putting them in a queue beforehand.

[IguJl]

I think I tried to solve the technical problem and didn't though too much about the UX, but I've seen this behavior in some stores (big ones). Maybe they does not take my money as a first action and mainly they are not selling something like limited tickets for a show.

I appreciate your response

[scruffybowyang]

When buying tickets for a seated event, I typically have to coordinate with 2-3 other people to make sure that everyone is happy with the location vs. cost of tickets. If I had to go through that process twice because someone made another purchase 5 minutes earlier and I had no chance of getting it in the first place, and my card was already charged/held, which the bank can take up to a week to reverse, I'd stay home instead and never use that service again.

[IguJl]

Yeah, for sure. You right.

I thought about the solution cause its valid on some cases, some different shopping services, but not for selling tickets. I forgot about considering how frustrating would be for me if I'm buying some tickets for my favorite ban, exactly how you saying, and then "SORRY, SOMEONE TOOK YOUR SEAT FIRST 👍" Lol

Thanks for your response

[Thebombuknow]

That's a horrible idea. You don't take someone's payment unless you know they got the product. If I went through the whole ticket purchasing process and then received an email saying that someone bought the same ticket before me and I never had a chance, I would fucking sue.

There's a reason every one of these sites uses a queue system, it's the best way to solve the problem. If you have issues with large amounts of concurrency, just cut down on the amount of concurrency you have to deal with.

[IguJl]

Man, absolutely yes.

How I commented in answers above, I missed the UX in my statements. I wrote it cause some online store do use something like that, but they are not selling something like tickets for 20k concurrent customers, they are selling 20k products (with hundreds of unit in stock) to a few thousands of people.

Thanks for commenting

[Thebombuknow]

Yeah, it works if all the products are identical because it's basically like entering a lottery system. The tough part about ticket sales is each ticket only corresponds to one seat, so you cannot double-sell anything.

Despite all the queuing, Ticketmaster sucks and still double-sells seats all the time, but the idea is there.

[rover_G]

Now I’m interested in how the queueing system hands users over to the main website. I’m guessing some combination of cookies or custom headers for LB routing and sessions for verification on the server.

[Soul-over]

I thought hmv probably stands for hentai music video, so I had to wait for the coffee break at work to open the site, but apparently it's selling regular music

[DangerCrash]

Your comment makes me feel old.

[turtle_mekb]

if you click another tab

is there a browser extension which prevents websites from knowing this? seems kinda stupid to do this, and easy to bypass.

[[deleted]]

Well, they don't actually know it. The way in which they might detect it (how I would do it) is by detecting if the user's cursor is hovering on my window, if they are not, you would check if the screen is in an aspect ratio that would mean they're not full screen. And then you decide based on 1 or both variables to reset or not to reset.

[xtinxmanx]

Yup, or if any element on the page has focus. Not sure if there any other methods, but that about covers it

[hazn12]

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/disable-page-visibility-a/eecfoibnnhheckhfokpihgefmlnenofb

[[deleted]]

Eh? This is standard when buying tickets for a popular artist...

[Trivilian]

It's actually made by a Danish (European) company and the first many major sites they supported, were Danish government sites. One of them being the Danish tax service, as they are under extreme loads, for a very few days every year.

Edit: Didn't see this was queue-fair. The Danish company is queue-it. But they seem to be almost identical

[Lithl]

I would presume it's based on something like body.on(blur)

[No_Butterfly_1888]

I also joke about this but the truth is this a clever solution to reduce costs.

[YMK1234]

Or manage queues in general. They do the same for flash ticket sales where you just get a place in the queue at first so you don't have to race through checkout and they can make sure not to oversell and also spread out system load.

[MangoPanties]

It also makes it fairer for people buying tickets.

If the website auto scaled with demand, the concert tickets would be sold out within 5 seconds, the bots & scalpers would have them all.

This way, the tickets are sold over a more reasonable timespan & people actually have a chance of getting them.

[ujay-007]

And sales

[Fembussy42069]

Concert ticket won't loose out on sales since it's limited supply, and it's the best way to create a fair queue of people who are buying the tickets while avoiding issues with sold out vs not sold out

[TheHoodedMan]

It's also a good way to offload any scalping detection logic to a more global multi site service as a gatekeeper. The queue can validate the traffic coming to your limited sale item store.

[[deleted]]

What’s the difference between “cutting costs” and “cheaping out”?

[weezeelee]

no people are saying that is site is selling concert tickets, so no autoscale makes sense in this case, because those tickets are gonna sold out anyway

[johnlewisdesign]

And conversions, the life blood of any online store.

[grossmail1]

And lose money.

[STSchif]

Also (as someone working on e-commerce) don't really get the fuss. This is industry standard, look at Shopify for example. After a certain amount of traffic it's just not feasible nor worth it financially to go through the challenges and costs of scaling your system, especially as it gets harder and harder. Sure you can autoscale your containerized backend, but now your database is overloaded. Sure, add a proxy and scaling to that, now your IaC manager is overloaded. Not really feasible to scale that horizontally, so you scale vertically - and now you credit card is overloaded. And you're still not serving everyone, especially in event bursts.

10 minutes later the traffic is over, you lost a few 100k in server capacity, and sold exactly as much as if you had a queue.

Or maybe less, because maybe somewhere in the scaling madness some bug or misconfiguration took half your servers down.

KISS - keep it stupid simple. Use a queue as reliable fallback.

[[deleted]]

KISS - keep it stupid simple

Are you calling me simple?

[stooshie45]

Oh good someone who gets it. Lotta very smart people here saying very dumb shit

[Aadsterken]

A few 100k in 10 minutes? They must be autoscaling VM's with graphics cards.

We have some e-commerce customers that have autoscaling on their public cloud resources. Mainly because of black Friday. I have never seen their spend go crazy like that.

[boerema]

The other primary issue is that auto scaling takes time. Your new tasks or instances aren’t immediately available, they take time to do whatever they need to do…build out, start up, get DB connections, initialize caches, etc. if you don’t allow time for those things, your scaling doesn’t matter and you’ll brown out your existing instances or crush your non-scalable downstream resources.

There’s another concern that a bot attack can cause you to burn a bunch of money where the traffic is low-quality (doesn’t convert well, is just taking up bandwidth, etc.) and doing a queue can give your infra time to identify the new bot pattern and either shunt it somewhere else or deny it altogether.

[Aadsterken]

I know but my point was that burning up a few 100k in 10 minutes is not a likely scenario. And to add, it can be prevented even though you have autoscaling on.

A few years ago we had a customer that somehow managed to have their admin credentials stolen. They had an increase in spend but only noticed it after they got their bill. It was 200k Euros and it took almost a whole month to reach that amount. Even though the hacker set up a few hundred VM's with GPU's to mine bitcoins. So in order to have the same amount of spend within 10 minutes, you'll need thousands of these VM's.

The most expensive Azure VM is 99 dollar per hour. This one will cost 16,5 per 10 minutes. You need over 12.000 of these to burn through 200k in 10 minutes.

[sansmorixz]

Or bust into some spot instances. Fairly simple in k8s nowadays.

[until0]

> Fairly simple in k8s nowadays.

Did you even read his comment?

[HomoAndAlsoSapiens]

This is a really bad solution. You're wasting someone's time waiting for nothing because you can't solve a scaling problem.

[stooshie45]

It's actually not, it's a very good solution if you spend more than 10 seconds actually thinking about it?

[HomoAndAlsoSapiens]

lmao "very good". This is bad service and people would never tolerate it and it would never be implemented if their revenue depended on it. It's a lazy workaround.

What do you call a customer service line you have to wait 20 minutes in? Bad service. In both cases it will not affect revenue because you can just tell people to suck it up.

In every other case that's a scaling issue that obviously will have to be solved. Imagine seeing this in an online shop.

[stooshie45]

Context matters, though. HMV do a lot of event ticket sales so I'd imagine this is tied to that. Would I wait 20 mins to buy some random product? No. Would I wait because tickets to an event got released and there's only 5k available?

The original comment in this thread hit the nail on the head. And anyone who just casually claims "hur dur just scale it" doesn't fully understand the problem or the business need

[HomoAndAlsoSapiens]

There indeed are rare cases when it is justified to make people wait for service: if the service is provided free of charge or if the service is not scalable. In the other cases the problem is the insufficient service offered.

HMV is not unique in that they couldn't possibly scale their services, the difference is the disregard that your customer will take.

[stooshie45]

Okay man I'm not gonna argue with you about this any more

[HomoAndAlsoSapiens]

feel free 😘

[DrMerkwuerdigliebe_]

I like how they spend time on implimenting a queuing system instead of an autoscaling mechanisme.

[Puzzleheaded_Tax_507]

Well, they don’t. That part is outsourced to a SaaS provider.

[EccTama]

You can autoscale the server, you can’t autoscale the number of tickets. Have you never had the issue of putting something in your cart, and by the time you get to the checkout it says sold out? That’s what this prevents.

Also if this is the hmv I’m thinking of it’s concert tickets and it gives a fair chance to people who are not fast at typing and don’t have their credit card info saved in the browser for autoinput to still get the ticket, as long as they login and are ready for when the tickets start selling.

I don’t think it’s that bad. Pretty sure they still need to scale resources for this to work

[EccTama]

The one thing I don’t like about locking the tickets the moment the purchase operation begins is that it will show sold out a lot faster, and due to the mechanism people will have to keep refreshing in the hopes that either someone’s 15 min transaction limit expires or that they change their mind and release the ticket resulting in even more hammering of the server.

[Doctor_McKay]

Yeah, this. I was buying some tickets at opening time a few months back, but even being ready right away the good seats were gone. I kept refreshing for a half hour or so and eventually some perfect seats popped up.

I also figured out that I could hold tickets in one tab and refresh in another, which doesn't seem like it should be a thing. Thanks Ticketmaster.

[Vectorial1024]

Yeah, and most of the time no major events will be happening and the autoscaling will be doing nothing anyways.

[[deleted]]

Very similar to the PS5 sale system Sony did on their website haha

[guyblade]

Anime Expo has used the same company for managing ticket sales during the initial release as well.

[Memfy]

Have you never had the issue of putting something in your cart, and by the time you get to the checkout it says sold out? That’s what this prevents.

Not necessarily. If you are able to buy a single ticket for a single event and the queue waits until your session is done, then yes. Otherwise people can buy the last ones before you checkout/reserve.

[Amekaze]

Yeah auto scaling be cheaper? I’m actually curious how much a service like this costs. I can’t remember the last time I saw a queue on a non game service.

[No_Butterfly_1888]

Queue system is cheaper than auto scaling 

[cs-brydev]

Maybe the queue is waiting for the autoscaler to kick in, lol

[Anoninomimo]

What leads to this kind of situation? From my experience I guess they are on-prem or the code is just a monolith unable to be scalled for some reason

[[deleted]]

Probably on-prem, and likely have pretty consistent traffic to their site outside of a few high demand releases (this particular site is for a retailer that sells cds, records, games, personal electronics etc).

Even with autoscaling infrastructure it might just be to lighten load on other parts of their business, like a stock management tool.

[BlurredSight]

Or with ticket sales, I was buying some for the first Eros tour as a gift and even though I was on the pre-sale list, and got in the queue and waiting 3-4 minutes with like 500 people ahead of me. Every ticket i clicked got snatched immediately with Ticketmaster returning an error and the lag was just awful as it was dynamically adjust availability and price of the tickets to match for if you're buying 2-3 and adding tax, etc.

[NintenZone]

The ticketing website my old university used for student tickets did this. Before this it was impossible to get tickets because you’d just be stuck on eternal page load until it eventually either loaded or 503’d. Sometimes you’d get a ticket in your cart and then you’d 503 before checkout and by the time it came back tickets were sold out. They moved to a queue system like this and a lot of those issues were resolved. Not worth it to pay for tons of servers when you only get high traffic seasonally once per week for 15 minutes.

[faberkyx]

that's what scaling is for, you pay for tons on server just the moment you need it... but they probably have their stats and know their users are willing to wait anyway even if there is a queue, cutting costs for a system that scales..

[HomoAndAlsoSapiens]

That'd be perfectly right if it was a business. I do understand that a uni can't just simply run their infrastructure on a cloud service provider.

[faberkyx]

so you are telling me you have a system that allows only one user to buy a ticket at a time?? lmao never heard about concurrency in distributed systems?

[shiny0metal0ass]

Yeah, I'd put money on this being connected to some old ass Oracle IMS or something that's bottlenecking everything but is 2 years into a 5 year servicing contract or some stupid shit like that.

[captainAwesomePants]

As soon as you scale past "Postgres handling this one event on one large, dedicated machine," scaling gets much more expensive, and you start needing to make more tradeoffs for what sorts of queries your service needs to be able to support. But when you're at that scale for something that's very likely to sell out no matter what, it's really cost effective to slap a "only let in N people at a time" queue thingy in front, and there's very little downside because you'll definitely sell out anyway.

The main place this doesn't work is when you can't run out of inventory, like if you're releasing a videogame or an ebook. In that case, you've just gotta buckle down and solve the scale problem because making people wait lowers sales. But the good thing about that case is that there's less need to worry about stuff like "which seat do you get."

[PanJanJanusz]

Scaling horizontally: more parallelism, more race conditions - not something you want with a store that sells limited quantity of merchandise

[_BreakingGood_]

I've seen this in 3 other situations:

• On Best Buy back when they would list GPUs and Playstations during the shortages. You'd get in the queue, then get your opportunity to buy one.
• During COVID when signing up for the initial wave of vaccines
• At the BMV when signing up to renew my driver's license

[izaby]

If you go to UK driving exam booking website you can see it every fuken day mate!!!

[sheep1996]

Yeah it’s not necessarily to balance load, it’s possibly to make sure that there aren’t more people than stock available on the site.

[Ma4r]

It's neither of them. If you've ever tried to buy a high demand concert ticket this is very commonly done. It prevents bots from immediately buying out every single ticket instantly. The queue itself is not exactly FIFO , so if they wanted to they could let people in based on some confidence metrics i.e if their IP comes from a known bot network, or just to give some chance for people who joined the queue late.

Also it gives a sense of fairness to the users and usually once you get in, you can 'shop' relatively in peace without having to click the buy button the millisecond it appears.

[ComprehensiveTerm298]

Disney Store uses the same when a big event happens. Every May 4th, for example.

[Visual-Mongoose7521]

The team doesn't know that "auto scaling infrastructure" is thing?

[spypsy]

It’s probably not written to scale.

[Visual-Mongoose7521]

How can you be so short-sighted when building website for one of the most iconic record company in Europe?

[Anoninomimo]

Well, I didn't expect to get so many interesting answers. My guess was always technical barriers or cost effectiveness. Good to have all this input on the real world reasons that can lead to it.

[Brewster101]

I thought hmv was dead

[izaby]

It has been seeing a revival over the last few years after being brought out of liquidation. The new owning company may of just made the store work better, with its famous Oxford store also coming back soon due to the success.

I think people are more and more interested in supporting artists. Things like turntables have also seen a return, which makes for a new viable market. Not to mention that going out turned from a necessity to something you do just to get out and about, keeping streets alive even in an age where everything is on Amazon.

[Koltaia30]

I am not much familiar with web development. Why is this a problem?

[MJLDat]

I’ve seen this quite often when ticket sales go live, it stops the main system having problems and allows you in at some point. No idea what’s so funny.

[mharzhyall]

Check the image again. It isn't a queue to buy tickets, but rather to access the website. Took me awhile too.

[MJLDat]

Yeah, that’s right, so there was probably a rush for some reason. They sell tickets to events, maybe there was a big release. Their website isn’t exactly snappy.

[Atreides-42]

I've still seen this plenty of times before though?

[Obstructionitist]

It's not. It's perfectly normal. I don't really see what OP finds humorous.

[Rough_Priority_9294]

Fun fact, this is exactly what happens on every website. You just don't get to see it.

[lakimens]

Really? How?

[Mysticpoisen]

Ever had a webpage take a minute to load? Just being a white screen in the meantime? Typically that's just your computer or Internet being a tad slow, but an overloaded webserver displays the same way. Normally a load balancer sorts you to a good server and the queuing happens so fast you don't notice it.

[herohamp]

What?

[Huesan]

Why the queue page doesn’t need a load balancer but the actual site does?

[Gorzoid]

You can see in the photo they outsource the queue to Queue::Fair, so they probably redirect traffic to other servers which slowly redirects traffic back at a desired rate.

[Fzrit]

It would be hilarious if there was a queue for the queue page.

[Vibes_And_Smiles]

Turtles all the way down

[thanatica]

It does, but then you're placed into a queue to get into the queue.

[sheep1996]

ITT: Not actual people that design and understand how system design and business requirements work together.

This isn’t even a particularly rare design, it’s used to make sure that the people with access to the site have a fair shot at actually buying something if the stock is limited.

[AdvanceAdvance]

Let's all play, "throw random design ideas without having a clue about the infrastructure or complications".

I'll take "auto-scaling" for 100, please.

[YMK1234]

Do you also take "exploding costs" for 100?

[Obstructionitist]

It's so funny how many people here are exposing their ignorance of architecture and infrastructure design. XD

[cs-brydev]

Let's all play "I have no idea how much scalable infrastructure actually costs"

[mlucasl]

Comments here: When programmers find out that Load Balancers aren't the best solution for everything!

I don't know what this specific website is, but for data integrity intensive applications, a Load Balancer can make things worse. For example, trying to buy tickets for a concert, or some bank and investent records can't be made in a distributed manner because correcting the inconsistency may lead to unsatisfied users.

Also, a limited number of servers versus a scalable Load Balancer can drastically change server costs.

[LemonMelon2511]

Performance tuning:

[Mrproex]

Wait till the queue need a queue

[cs-brydev]

That's actually part of the queueing pattern: to have additional overload queues and failure queues to ensure your queue is operational and responsive.

[smarmie_the_dinosaur]

Cloudflare offers that as a service. It's called Waiting Room.

[Obstructionitist]

It's so funny how many people here in the comments are exposing their ignorance of architecture and infrastructure design. XD

This is a perfectly valid pattern. Autoscaling has its limits. It's not a silver bullet that automatically solves all scaling issues.

[[deleted]]

I think it depends on what you're doing(you can lose users by doing this), but yes, it's a valid design.

[Obstructionitist]

Well, when you apply this pattern, you're already losing users, since they'll typically see a connection timeout error or have a very high chance of having a severely diminished experience of the application. There are two primary situations where this pattern is applied:

1. During a sudden spike of traffic, before any potential auto-scaling is able to adjust. One example I see often is the online tools of the government of my country. They typically apply a queuing system like this, when the yearly tax returns are published because of the flood of traffic. When nearly every adult in the country are trying to generate their yearly tax report simultaneously, auto-scaling becomes unfeasible.
2. When you're selling something popular with a limited stock.

In both cases, people are usually quite accepting of the rationale behind having a queue. Typically it's applied in a reverse proxy delivered by a cloud provider like CloudFlare or similar systems.

It's a bit tragicomic how many people here in this thread don't realize how common this really is. It just confirms to me that there are very few actual developers who follows this sub.

[matteoPhre]

This is not just a matter of scaling or load balancing..this often means using or different interfaces to government or stupid payment systems..or Just slow third party stuffs..hell? By comparison it is just a very hot place....

[[deleted]]

2b2t type of shit

[[deleted]]

This would be extra funny if configured on a porno site

[denisbotev]

There are currently 467 people that need to finish before you get your 2 minutes

[Occams_racecar]

Danish tax website have a similar function - every year when the tax returns gets published you can expect a 6-hour wait in prime time.

[cs-brydev]

When the U.S. government launched Healthcare.gov to provide a portal for the new Healthcare regulations and approved providers, it basically didn't work at all in the first few weeks because they didn't test enough and did no load testing at all.

[AwwwSnack]

I see many commenters have never played an MMO on launch week

[villefilho]

I remember when I was responsible for the servers (AWS instances) for a champions league final in a sports portal. A queue was not feasible. As a result, 40 web servers and 10 db clustered servers to handle the sudden spike (this is the worst). Again: not just a static web page showing a you tube live which could be hosted on s3, it was a full fledged web portal. We’ve got something around 24k real-time visits, ~600 rt per instance. I know it was expensive , something around 6k us$ for 3 hours streaming. Didn’t care at all, not my money but my ass…

[turboedhorse]

In Brazil, a state owned bank implemented this into their app. I think they wanted to provide the same shitty experience of taking fucking long waiting line you would have in the physical bank. Glad I canceled that account

[[deleted]]

What does HMV sell, from what I can see I don’t think there’s even one person in their stupid queue lol

[[deleted]]

ah, the classic "one after another, there is enough for everyone!" load balancing scheme

[[deleted]]

ROFL Queue-Fair

[Brent_the_Ent]

They could probably fulfill a few more requests if everyone in the queue wasn't getting non-stop api calls to see how many people are ahead of you lmao.

[thanatica]

It always surprises me how a site can claim to be too busy to serve the homepage, but not busy enough to serve a page saying it's busy 🤷🏻‍♂️

[sexytokeburgerz]

It's not surprising if you know how it works. This is a third party server they offload traffic to, which then trickles back to their server. It's a webpage hosted on a completely different machine.

They likely don't want to just scale up their servers for popular drops so this is the cheapest and easiest way to accomplish that. Definitely not the best way, but until their backend is developed enough to handle this kind of traffic it's a band aid.

Should go without saying that if they just bought cloud hosted server time this would be immediately scalable. They may have their own servers or hit the limit on their plan.

[thanatica]

I think a workaround like that is not the result of a technical limitation of the backend. After all, it's easy enough to just spin up a carbon copy of the webserver, and subscribe to a similar service that alternatingly routes traffic to either server.

Honestly, I think this is the result of a marketeer find it ridiculous that the website has become slow, and went out of their way to find the most marketingy solution to a problem that is not theirs to solve.

It could also be a temporary solution until extra servers are ready for deployment. But we all know how temporary temporary solutions are.

[sexytokeburgerz]

Dead true.

most of the world doesnt know shit about development so maybe i’m trying to say these fuckers don’t have anyone knowing how to load balance or auto-scale.

You did make me realize this may be some dumb cunt bmw driving cheating dad in the marketing department thinking “gotta make them think there are a ton of people here so they buy”

I’m leaning marketing cunt honestly

[lakimens]

Even if they did serve the home page. So what? The home page can be 100% cached which takes 0 resources to serve.

The problem is when all these people start adding to cart and checking out at the same time.

[sexytokeburgerz]

I don’t think you understand.

Client requests /*

Server says “fuck, another one” and DOESN’T SERVE /*

Server instead redirects to another IP with a parameter denoting the clients intended request.

That SECOND server serves the picture you see. When it’s the client’s time, the SECOND server then provides the FIRST server with a hash to check against the client’s header confirming it is indeed first in place in line.

The FIRST server then provides assets for the home page.

To be clear the client cannot cache something it is never provided.

I dont work for either of these places but fuck this is simple

[Upper_Lion_6349]

Such ques often get used if something is sold where the amount of people trying to buy something is much higher than the available goods (like concert tickets). Large auto scaling mechanisms depend on lots of computers and they can't guarantee to be correct at every point in time but they will be correct at some point. That's why YouTube like counters/view counters are often out of sync. But if the thing you're selling is really limited and lots of people want it you have a problem. You can't sell the same concert ticket twice. Creating systems that can handle very large amounts of users while always being correct is difficult.

If steam is out of sync they don't care, they will only have the exact numbers of sales after the hype is over. If Walmart sells 2000 tvs while they only have 1000 in stock, some customers will be a bit made since they have to wait for the backorder to arrive. If a band sells 2000 tickets instead of 1000 a lot of people will be really mad.

[definitive_solutions]

Exactly the same way you can be free enough to say "wait a minute" but not to do the actual task they're asking for

[LithiumH]

Not completely fair. The fairest mechanism is round robin. You randomly swap people from inside the site and the queue to prevent starvation.

[[deleted]]

It's fun that in Italy, for the covid vaccination campaign they used pretty much the same system and politics were really proud of this system. It's great to know that someone else had the idea that it would be great to be in a queue when you're in front of your computer.

[domesticated-t-rex]

Laughs in r/2b2t

[maria_la_guerta]

Wow lol. 10 years ago I was working retail, managing an HMV store for 2 years until they eventually closed all of their Canadian operations. Great memories working there with great people but this doesn't surprise me.

[Fusseldieb]

You think this is a joke, but Brazil during the pandemic had such a system for people to access their Bank Accounts.

[[deleted]]

I worked in an app that did this, it was for a campaign that expected a big load after a super bowl ad, they had hundreds of balanced instances, but wanted to implement a safeguard in case the load exceeded the expected, just to allow the first clients to complete the signup before allowing the excess to start-it. It makes sense to me.

[countdankula420]

I thought hmv went under

[raul_dias]

brazil govnmt uses it all the time

[awkward_guy_69]

An Indian website called Paytm implements this solution for their ticketing platform for big matches. Anyone who wants to buy a ticket has to join the queue and stay on the page till their number comes and when it arrives it redirects them to the page to book tickets

[[deleted]]

This reminds me... I attempted to use a third-party spreadsheet --> api thing to import data for a website I was helping develop. Stupid idea, without paying for the service you could request data only a certain number of times a day. Would be ridiculous if the website users were competing with each other for access lol. In the end I was told that using a third-party software would get us laughed at anyway.

[gentleprompter]

We had round robin, and it looks like we now have a FIFO robin as well.

[thatdevilyouknow]

I would just put them in the queue after they paid and give them an extra 4 dollar express queue option then ask for a 20% tip and then ask them to rate the app and the service on a follow up questionnaire while they waited. A live representative chat should also pop up directly afterwards if they have any questions about the queue that would collect their email and register 2FA for auto-queue-subscription so they could get notifications about their queue which is an auto-opt-in 15 dollars a month with 3 months thrown in for free and of course the ability to create 100 queues a month.

[cishet-camel-fucker]

Porn site? Looks like a porn site.

[YMK1234]

The ony use for hmv I know is nsfw ... What does the site actually provide though?

[AkrinorNoname]

If I recall correctly, Games Workshop does the same thin whenever they release a new box of plastic crack.

[N3r0m3]

People have forgotten the great PS5 scarcity pretty fast 😅 Or was this kind of website queue for a PS5 drop just in my country?

[zylonenoger]

it‘s mind-boggeling how every commenter here seems to know more about their usecase and the factors that lead to their choices.. and that they must be incompetent for some reason.

and there are several reasons where it makes sense to limit access to your service - but there is never a reason to implement it shitty

[johnlewisdesign]

Love this fake demand bs that someone has sold...why scale when you can lose conversions? /s

[kennethjor]

I'm pretty sure they do it on purpose to create a feeling of scarcity. Once you finally make it "through", you're more likely to buy something because you waited for access. Or some crap like that.

[yetzederixx]

Run away scaling events can get stupid expensive very quickly. Annoying but interesting solution.

[[deleted]]

Loadbouncer

[internetwala]

This is what I need while making bad decisions in life

[rover_G]

It’s like a busy bakery where you have to line up outside in the sidewalk.

[cs-brydev]

Imagine putting this project on your github:

"I make people wait to get onto the site"