Case Study: Indian Railways achieves 200,000+ concurrent purchases and 150,000 tickets/hour in e-ticketing with Pivotal GemFire (Pivotal)

Distributed in-memory data management solution improves the capacity and availability of new e-ticketing system

Indian Railways, one of the world’s largest rail networks carrying over 23 million passengers daily, struggled with an overloaded e-ticketing system that frequently crashed or slowed to a 15-minute transaction time during peak "Tatkal" booking windows. The legacy 2002 architecture could not handle surges above ~40,000 concurrent users, forcing many customers back to station queues and prompting a 2013 re-architecture led by the Centre for Railway Information Systems (CRIS).

CRIS rebuilt the application around Pivotal GemFire, a distributed in-memory database, piloting in June 2014 and launching in July 2014. The new system now supports more than 200,000 concurrent users, processes about 150,000 tickets per hour (vs. 60,000 previously), completes most transactions in seconds, and raised online sales from 50% to 65%, increasing e-ticket revenue to roughly INR 600 million daily.

Indian Railways