It also has an engineering analogy in Apache Passenger Global queuing. And this article explains why it works the way it does http://blog.phusion.nl/2008/10/29/

It also has an engineering analogy in Apache Passenger Global queuing. And this article explains why it works the way it does http://blog.phusion.nl/2008/10/29/phusion-passenger-now-with-global-queuing/ http://blog.phusion.nl/2008/10/29/phusion-passenger-now-with... As an aside: The Fry's Electronics store in my city does this and the line does move at a pretty brisk pace, but I had always thought it a rather odd setup till I read this and made the connection to global queuing in Passenger. fascinating.