Edge Security Acceleration:Waiting room

What is Waiting Room

When your website launches activities such as flash sales or ticket sales, an extensive number of users flock to it in a certain period. Such high-concurrency visits may bring origin servers down, which greatly hinders your business availability and user experience. To address this issue, Edge Security Acceleration (ESA) provides the Waiting Room feature to limit the number of users to the origin and queue excess users in a waiting room. Then, the queued users wait for some time until it is their turn to access the origin server.

You can use cookies to track the positions of users in a queue. A cookie works like a ticket that indicates the entry to a waiting room. A waiting room also provides users with estimated wait time and updated queuing information.

Benefits

The Waiting Room feature helps you flexibly handle traffic surges in the following aspects:

• Adaptive management of origin traffic: You can set the maximum number of active users and the number of new users per minute based on the capabilities of your origin server.

• Session reserve: The status of each visitor is remembered to ensure their place in line is preserved. This eliminates the need to re-queue if they temporarily navigate away.

• Multiple queuing methods: Waiting Room supports various queuing methods, such as First In, First Out (FIFO) and Random.

• Bypassing waiting room: You can configure waiting room bypass rules to allow specific requests to reach your origin without queuing during traffic spikes.

How it works

After the client request is sent to the ESA POP:

If the cache is hit, the ESA POP responds with the cached content directly to the client.

If the cache is miss, the client request will fetch the content from the origin server. In this case, the ESA POP will match the URL of the client request according to the configured waiting room matching rules.

• If the request does not match the URL rule that you configured for the waiting room, the request directly goes to the origin to fetch resources.

• If the request matches the URL rule, the system checks whether the thresholds of total active users per minute and new users per minute are reached.

  • If the thresholds are not reached, the request is sent to the origin.

  • If one of the thresholds is reached, the request is queued in a waiting room.

Availability

The Waiting Room feature is supported only in the Premium and Enterprise plans. To activate the feature,contact us.