System and method of accelerating response time to inquiries regarding inventory information in a network

摘要

A method and system for distributing access to inventory items available at vendor locations includes user stations transmitting user inquiries on a communications network. Network-connected location servers access a set of inventory availability information associated with inventory items available at their respective location, for example, tables at a restaurant. The host server receives user inquiries regarding availability of items associated with at least some of the location servers and queries a cache server that locally stores a binary subset of the information from the location servers to determine if the requested item is available without having to separately query the database at each location. Particularly, a web server receives and stores information regarding only whether a requested item is available or not available from a particular location rather than how many items are available at the location. A user, therefore, can access availability of inventory items with less communications traffic.

主权项

1. A system for providing availability information, comprising:
one or more web servers configured to receive a user inquiry regarding availability of one or more inventory items associated with one or more location servers, wherein the availability of one or more inventory items comprises availability of one or more restaurant tables; and a yes/no change in inventory server configured to store a material change in inventory information regarding at least a subset of the one or more inventory items associated with at least a subset of the one or more location servers, wherein the yes/no change in inventory server is configured to only provide the one or more web servers access to the material change in inventory information, and wherein the material change in inventory information is updated only when there is a material change of availability of the one or more inventory items associated with the one or more location servers, and wherein the material change in inventory information comprises ‘yes/no’ status of a table availability for a specified table capacity for a specified time at a restaurant; the one or more location servers, wherein one of the one or more location servers receives a request to reserve one of the one or more inventory items based at least in part on the material change in inventory information and provides an indication that the one of the one or more inventory items has been reserved, and wherein each location server of the one or more location servers determines whether a message has been sent to the yes/no change server within a predetermined time period and in the event that the message has not been sent within the predetermined time period, a heartbeat message is sent to the yes/no change server.