Dumb website only lets one user in at a time

Re:Dumb website only lets one user in at a time by bityard on Monday July 08, 2024 @06:21PM (#40910371)

Not at all the same thing I admit, but the company I work for has a product that limits the number of transactions (per user) to 1. Where "transaction" is roughly equivalent to an HTTP request. So if you run a query that takes 30 seconds, get bored, open up a new tab to do something else in the product, your new tab will hang until the transaction in the previous tab has completed.

I hate it.

There is a special URL that will kill your running transaction. All of the engineers know it and have it bookmarked, but it's undocumented.

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Re:Dumb website only lets one user in at a time by vasco on Monday July 08, 2024 @06:31PM (#40910460)

A manager thought that they could reduce scope on implementing proper rate limiting after a postmortem or how does this appear?

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Re:Dumb website only lets one user in at a time by knallfrosch on Wednesday July 10, 2024 @07:05AM (#40925642)

Maybe some transactions write state, instead of merely querying?

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Re:Dumb website only lets one user in at a time by giancarlostoro on Wednesday July 10, 2024 @11:53AM (#40928267)

Maybe too many people were overloading the system by opening too many tabs, making it worse. Sounds like this application needs basic fine tuning (I bet there's 0 indexing on the database, and who knows what else).

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Re:Dumb website only lets one user in at a time by od1nos on Monday July 08, 2024 @06:48PM (#40910599)

ServiceNow?

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Re:Dumb website only lets one user in at a time by knodi123 on Monday July 08, 2024 @11:14PM (#40912216)

Ha. When I moved into my town, the public library's online book search was only turned on from 9-5, monday through saturday. Apparently it was so unstable they didn't want anyone trying to use it unless they had an IT guy on hand? I'm guessing? Anyway, they eventually outsourced to bibliocommons, but oy, what a ridiculous limitation to have as late as 2007.

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Re:Dumb website only lets one user in at a time by Doxin on Tuesday July 09, 2024 @04:25AM (#40913719)

A local pizza place has a website that closes outside of business hours. Which is infuriating if you're trying to figure out business hours in the first place.

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Re:Dumb website only lets one user in at a time by giancarlostoro on Wednesday July 10, 2024 @11:52AM (#40928257)

So its running on a computer in their restaurant, and someone shuts it off when they leave. : - )

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Re:Dumb website only lets one user in at a time by Doxin on Thursday July 11, 2024 @02:27AM (#40934114)

Oh no not at all. The site just shows a notice that the site is closed. None of the other pages work anymore but the server is clearly still running.

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Re:Dumb website only lets one user in at a time by Freak_NL on Wednesday July 10, 2024 @12:35PM (#40928699)

There is a Dutch chain of baby necessities which is owned by a fundamentalist Christian. You wouldn't know except for the infuriating message their websites (there where some mergers and I think this affects two large online shops) on Sunday, all day long, are closed because of the Sabbath. A multi million Euro business which just shuts down all of its websites on Sunday.

The owner can apparently afford it, because I ran into this when we made a baby and was comparison shopping for a stroller. Obviously you move on and go somewhere else. The owner literally misses sales for his beliefs.

Now I don't want people working Sundays shipping stuff people bought, but those websites can do their thing perfectly without anyone lifting a finger until they come into work on Monday to a stack of orders to handle.

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Re:Dumb website only lets one user in at a time by burntwater on Wednesday July 10, 2024 @01:51PM (#40929508)

B&H (https://www.bhphotovideo.com/) is somewhat like this. Super popular business, but you can't order online on Saturdays. You can browse the website, just not place an order. Their physical store is also closed on Saturdays, and closes early on Fridays. They also close for days/weeks at a time for Jewish holidays.

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Re:Dumb website only lets one user in at a time by knodi123 on Thursday July 11, 2024 @12:43PM (#40938401)

I saw a single-panel comic once of an old man, manacled, alone, in a dank dungeon cell. The caption is "I know not how long I have been in here. The days and years flow together, and my mind is haunted by memories. But I want Chick-Fil-A, so it must be Sunday."

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Re:Dumb website only lets one user in at a time by jesprenj on Wednesday July 10, 2024 @11:55AM (#40928282)

The official government website for accessing information about property ownership information in Slovenia only works during working hours -- mon-fri 8h-20h.

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Re:Dumb website only lets one user in at a time by appplication on Wednesday July 10, 2024 @03:25PM (#40930493)

It seems like it would be more work to implement a website that shuts down depending on time of day than just leave it up.

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Re:Dumb website only lets one user in at a time by bobbiechen on Wednesday July 10, 2024 @05:24PM (#40931635)

https://bobbiechen.com/blog/2022/7/21/what-if-your-website-h... - but think about the (tiny) infrastructure savings!

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Re:Dumb website only lets one user in at a time by sentientslug on Tuesday July 09, 2024 @01:37AM (#40912811)

This sounds like ServiceNow… if it is I’d love to know that special URL.

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Re:Dumb website only lets one user in at a time by retzkek on Wednesday July 10, 2024 @03:49PM (#40930778)

Seems to be documented, surprisingly: https://<INSTANCE>.service-now.com/cancel_my_transaction.do

https://support.servicenow.com/kb?id=kb_article_view&sysparm...

Or you can type “cancel_my_transaction.do” in the navigator filter bar. Related tip: you can quickly bring up any table by typing “table_name.list” (s/.do/.list/ from the single-item url) there instead of poking around for a link. “sys_user.list” is probably the one I use most often.

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Re:Dumb website only lets one user in at a time by sentientslug on Saturday July 13, 2024 @03:25PM (#40956232)

This is so awesome. Thank you for sharing!

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Re:Dumb website only lets one user in at a time by hifromwork on Wednesday July 10, 2024 @06:24AM (#40925464)

A national train company where I live in limits the number of transactions (per user) to 1. Where "transaction" is roughly equivalent to a browser tab - the website will aggressively scold you if you try to open another tab and refuse to load!

I think it's realated to the session mess they have in the backend but it's very annoying (especially when buying train tickets and comparing offers, of all things).

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Re:Dumb website only lets one user in at a time by NikolaNovak on Wednesday July 10, 2024 @12:25PM (#40928597)

A lot of ERPs try to limit the number of tabs; I don't fully understand the reason - it may be because of the stuff they do in the browser before syncing to the database at submission/commit time, so they want to avoid apparent inconsistency?

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Re:Dumb website only lets one user in at a time by DANmode on Thursday July 11, 2024 @03:41AM (#40934483)

It's because the person sipping champagne with the software vendor isn't checking the performance of features before signing.

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Re:Dumb website only lets one user in at a time by willcipriano on Wednesday July 10, 2024 @06:44PM (#40932223)

I'd wager the overhead of manging a mutex to see if a user is currently using their transaction is greater than the occasional second transaction a user may occasionally invoke in most situations.

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