Case Study: Shanda Interactive Entertainment achieves 70% database load reduction and 40% bandwidth savings with A10 Networks' Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)

Accelerating Interactive Entertainment Media

Shanda Interactive’s Jinjiang (jjwxc.net) is China’s largest female creative-writing site, serving ~500,000 daily users and generating over 50 million page views with long session times and 100,000 eCommerce transactions a day. Rapid traffic growth (300% since 2007) strained its 100% BSD/Linux/MySQL infrastructure; the existing HAProxy load balancer could not keep MySQL and web servers responsive under the surge.

Shanda deployed a high‑availability pair of A10 Application Delivery Controllers (VIP with multiple real servers) to add URL‑hashing, compression, connection reuse and deep‑packet inspection. Results included a drop in MySQL queue length from >15% to <3%, roughly 70% database load reduction, bandwidth savings of 40%–66%, streamlined TCP overhead and built‑in DDoS/protection—delivering better availability and performance without extra licensing fees.

Shanda Interactive Entertainment

Ye Ning

Technical Director, Shanda Interactive Entertainment