Case Study: China Railway Corporation achieves continuous high-performance, massively scalable online ticketing with VMware Tanzu GemFire

Scaling online sales for the largest railway in the world

China Railway Corporation, the national rail operator of China serving 20 million daily users and booking 4–5 million tickets a day, faced severe scalability and availability problems: holiday peaks reached about 15,000 tickets per minute, 1.4 billion page views per day and 40,000 visits per second, causing outages, booking errors and payment failures. Its legacy stack of 72 UNIX servers and a traditional RDBMS could not meet SLAs or handle forecasted growth of up to 50% per year.

Working with IISI, the team migrated to an in‑memory data grid using VMware Tanzu GemFire, replacing the legacy RDBMS with a cluster of 10 primary x86 servers (plus backups) and >2 TB of memory. The new architecture delivers continuous uptime, thousands of transactions per second, near‑linear on‑demand scaling, improved developer productivity and lower operating cost—supporting record volumes during peak holidays and leaving capacity to grow.

China Railway Corporation

Jiansheng Zhu

Vice Director