Queue control for high-demand ticketing

This work ran inside ticketing portals for professional football clubs during high-demand sales windows. Before the change, there was no queue system, so users entered the sales flow at the same time and the portal broke under load.

The system collapsed under uncontrolled concurrency: timeouts, failed purchases, and revenue loss once traffic reached ~10,000 concurrent users.

A critical constraint was the external AVET system from LALIGA, which did not scale under peak load and could not be modified.

The failure was already impacting the business, including the loss of at least one commercial account.

I evaluated queue providers and selected Queue-Fair based on cost, fairness in the waiting room, and evidence of use at higher scale.

I handled the vendor conversation and agreement directly in English, then implemented Queue-Fair through a frontend script on WordPress because it gave faster rollout, simpler maintenance, and direct operational control.

The implementation combined that script integration with a decoupled match landing page, so access control could be activated and adjusted from WordPress without backend changes.

The sales flow stopped collapsing at around 10,000 concurrent users and moved to an ordered waiting room of roughly 60,000 users.

That gave the ticketing operation a controlled entry point and supported larger commercial accounts afterwards.