Holding customers at bay with a Magento queuing system

We're rapidly approaching peak season again and traffic scaling is once again at the top of all Magento store's checklists. There's three ways to help a Magento store cope with high levels of traffic,

Add additional hardware (like overflow servers)
Optimise Magento store code to perform better
Restrict the number of users on the site

I'm going to touch on the final point and how you can natively achieve this with MageStack through its built-in queuing engine.

Introducing MageStack-Queue

Whether you want to create an atmosphere of demand/competition or guarantee customers on the site can complete their checkout - queue systems have their place on all websites. Deploying one early can give confidence that no matter what traffic is thrown at you, you'll be able to ensure that your given limit of customers will always be able to access your site.

Think of MageStack queue of being a virtual waiting room, where users who are first-in, are the first-out; where you can present a custom queue page with full Google Analytics integration to monitor how many users are in the queue (and for how long).

When your queue is active, it looks something like this,

Installation

MageStack Queue can be installed as a composer package (so easily deployed with Magento 2, Laravel etc.) or as a standalone PHP library (for Magento 1, WordPress etc.).

Detailed installation steps can be found on the project homepage - but in this article, I'll show how it can be quickly integrated into an existing Magento 1 store.

Download and extract the module, I'm going to install it on example.com (replace as necessary)

cd /microcloud/domains/example/domains/example.com
wget --no-check-certificate https://github.com/sonassi/magestack-queue/archive/master.zip -O magestack-queue.zip
unzip magestack-queue.zip
mv magestack-queue-master ___queue
rm magestack-queue.zip

Edit Magento's index.php to include,

require __DIR__.'/../___queue/queue.php';

Then, we'll set up the module to use the built-in SQLite DB and then change it to MySQL mode for production
```
cd ___queue
php queue.php --install
```
Now lets simulate some users and check out the queue status,
```
php queue.php --simulate 101
php queue.php --status
```

That's pretty much it in terms of setting up the module, the remaining steps are to,

Enable the cron job - guide
Change the DB driver to MySQL - guide
Customise the template - guide