Waiting Room allows you to manage excess origin requests to prevent server downtime caused by unmanageable traffic surges. Specifically, you can configure how many users are allowed on your origin and queue excess users in a 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 of time. Such high-concurrency visits may bring the origin server 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 on the origin and queue excess users in a waiting room. Then, the queued users wait for a period of 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.
How it works
When a user requests content that is not cached on ESA points of presence (POPs), the request is routed to the origin server. Then, ESA compares the request URL with the URL rule that you configured for your waiting room.
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 are reached, the request is queued in a waiting room.
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.
Waiting room bypassing: You can configure waiting room bypass rules to allow specific requests to reach your origin without queuing during traffic spikes.
Feature availability
Feature | Entrance | Pro | Premium | Enterprise |
Waiting Room | No | No | Yes | Yes |