Case Study: Chess.com achieves stall-free, consistent gameplay for 10M+ daily games with Azul Systems' Azul Platform Prime

Azul Platform Prime stops Chess.com glitches for 10M+ games/day

Chess.com, a platform with more than 65 million members, over 250,000 concurrent users and 10+ million games played daily, was suffering multi-second “Stop-The-World” Java garbage-collection pauses that interrupted gameplay and degraded user loyalty. To solve this, Chess.com turned to Azul and its Azul Platform Prime Java runtime to address the unpredictable GC-induced application stalls.

Azul deployed Azul Platform Prime with no changes to Chess.com’s application or hardware; the optimized JVM eliminated the GC pauses, removing application stalls and improving reliability and the player experience across millions of daily games. The change also increased developer productivity by swapping the JVM without code changes and delivered better infrastructure efficiency — Azul reports higher throughput on the same hardware and potential server cost reductions (up to ~50% in some scenarios).

Chess.com

Erik Allebest

Chief Executive Officer & Founder