300 is the internet with network 302 representing a worldwide collection of networks and gateways that use the tcp ip suite of protocols to communicate with one another at the heart of the internet is a backbone of high speed data communication lines between major nodes or host computers consisting of thousands of commercial government educational and other computer systems that route data and messages of course network data processing system 300 also may be implemented as a number of different types of networks such as for example an intranet a local area network lan or a wide area network wan fig3 is intended as an example and not as an architectural limitation for the present invention the present invention describes a ticketing mechanism that eliminates retry waste for shared resources at a lower cost than dedicated busy signals under the description that follows a snoop protocol is assumed with transactions visible to and monitored by all participants that may need to use the shared resource fig4 shows an example of interconnection paths in a system consistent with implementing a preferred embodiment of the present invention in this example an example target resource 402 is shown though multiple target resources could also exist resource 402 has associated queuing agents 404 that receive and forward transaction requests through network interface 406 from transaction sources 410 to the target resource 402 in this example controller 408 administers the network interface in this example requests and commands are shown using solid arrow lines while responses are shown using dashed arrow lines in a preferred embodiment of the present invention each target or queuing agent along.