Case Study: China Railway Corporation achieves scalable, high-performance online ticketing with Pivotal GemFire

China Railway Corporation Scaling online sales for the largest railway in the world

China Railway Corporation (CRC) is the national rail operator serving the world’s largest passenger base—5,700 stations, about 20 million daily users and 4.5 million tickets booked per day with peak bursts of up to 15,000 tickets per minute. Their legacy setup of 72 UNIX servers and a traditional RDBMS repeatedly failed to meet demand during holiday peaks, causing outages, slow performance, booking/payment errors and missed SLAs.

Working with IISI, CRC replaced the legacy stack with Pivotal GemFire, an in‑memory data grid that runs on ten primary x86 servers (plus backups) to deliver continuous uptime, thousands of transactions per second, and near-linear on‑demand scaling. The migration eliminated many holiday outages, improved order processing and developer productivity, reduced costs, and produced a reliable production system that supports record volumes and can grow as mobile access expands.

China Railway Corporation