Remove Items from inventory when in cart

Is there a way to have items removed from the inventory when they are in a cart, but then removed if they do not complete the purchase is a set # of time?

I'm assuming the timing part is not a standard feature in Zen Cart, but is the removal from inventory when in cart possible?

I ask this because we are having problems with too many people trying to purchase a small # of items at the same time. For example, say we have 100 items, and 1000 people trying to purchase them at the same time. It allows as many people as possible to put the items in their cart before 100 people have completed the checkout process. Well, if all 1000 put it in their cart, only the first 100 will actually get the item, but the others will be able to checkout as well.

Does anyone have any thoughts on how to resolve this issue?

This would require quite a bit of customization as well as thought ...

A customer adds to the Cart ... if this is immediately removed from inventory, when is it restocked if the order is not completed?

Does this mean that when the restocking happens that there is no longer a saved cart?

If a customer adds a product to the cart at 1:00pm ... then adds a product at 1:15pm ... then times out on the session at 1:35pm ... what time does the cart get emptied and restocked? Do all products get restocked at once? Or do they slowly trickle out as the time that they were added approaches the 11th hour plus XX number of minutes? :unsure:

Should the cart remain available for any amount of time for the customer that ran to answer the door and found grandma just got in from Florida? Or ... you snooze you lose and all Products that made up that $500 order are lost to the customer, unless s/he gets lucky and it is still available when they return and have to re-buy the $500 worth of products that they spent 15 minutes shopping for before grandma got there?

Ajeh:

A customer adds to the Cart ... if this is immediately removed from inventory, when is it restocked if the order is not completed?

The item is restocked when the order times out. If this would be easiest, we could say all orders have 5 or 10 minutes from the time they are placed in the cart, to the time of checkout. The problem only arrises when a particular weekly item is released, and everyone is trying to buy that one item at the same time.

Ajeh:

Does this mean that when the restocking happens that there is no longer a saved cart?

Yes.

Ajeh:

If a customer adds a product to the cart at 1:00pm ... then adds a product at 1:15pm ... then times out on the session at 1:35pm ... what time does the cart get emptied and restocked? Do all products get restocked at once? Or do they slowly trickle out as the time that they were added approaches the 11th hour plus XX number of minutes? :unsure:

We are not necessarily worried about this, since 99.9% of these cases involve people with only 1 item in their cart, and who are racing to complete the purchase. Also, the timeframe for completion could be clearly noted at the beginning of the checkout process.

Ajeh:

Should the cart remain available for any amount of time for the customer that ran to answer the door and found grandma just got in from Florida? Or ... you snooze you lose and all Products that made up that $500 order are lost to the customer, unless s/he gets lucky and it is still available when they return and have to re-buy the $500 worth of products that they spent 15 minutes shopping for before grandma got there?

You snooze. You lose.

Now, only a completely seperate note (and I'll post this in a new post as well), is there any way to have the checkout process of the cart hosted on a seperate server then the store itself. The traffic we get at these times tends to crash the server, and it would be great to have a seperate server with little traffic to handle the checkout process for everyone who has the item in their cart. This way, the timing issue will not be affected by the lag on the server.