Web Virtual Waiting Room

We started using a proper waiting room this year and so far, during busy on-sales, it's worked a treat! Depending on your hardware arrangements, you can get a very sizeable waiting room that will effectively throttle the number of people hitting your main server.

As preparation, it's probably worth running a few queries to show you the number of orders made online on busiest days.

A very quick and simple example of that would be something along these lines:

select order_no,solicitor,order_dt
from t_order(NOLOCK)
where created_by = 'webapi' --replace with your web API user-name(s)
and order_dt between '2009-05-29' and '2009-05-30' --replace with your date/time range
order by order_dt

Pick the busiest day you can remember and arrange the results in a spreadsheet to show you the peak hourly usage. That could indicate the best way for your IT guys in terms of the scale of the hardware required, etc. This will not show you the users actually hitting the site, but rather purchasing through it. However, the other statistics should be readily available through your hosting company or the IT department.

This is, of course, only one step, but one has to start somewhere, right? :)

Michael,

How did you go about implementing the waiting room? Is it on the database side or on the web side of things? Any information you can provide would be much appreciated since we are looking at implementing a waiting room.

Thanks!

Naomi

Michael,

How did you go about implementing the waiting room? Is it on the database side or on the web side of things? Any information you can provide would be much appreciated since we are looking at implementing a waiting room.

Thanks!

Naomi

We had our website and the waiting room designed by POP at the same time, so I'm afraid I haven't got anything on the actual implementation, sorry...

However, as far as I know it has little to do with the database and much more to do with a separate web server handling incoming connecitons that reach a pre-set threshold.