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At the end of the year, at the time of the Spring Festival, topics around 12306 always emerge one after another. On the 28th of last month, train tickets went on sale on the first day of the Spring Festival, and the 12306 website could not withstand the number of visits and was paralyzed, and there was also a situation of "ID card and other personal information serial numbers", which really lived up to the "expectations" of the broad masses of the people. As soon as 2014 arrived, the 12306 website became the "focus" again. In order to prevent third-party software from swiping tickets, 12306 upgraded the verification code, turning the original static verification code into a color dynamic verification code. When entering, the new version of the verification code characters will keep shaking, making it difficult to distinguish, and netizens jokingly call it Picasso's abstract painting, which is a new way to play on the 12306 website in the New Year.
Watching the excitement is watching the excitement, 12306 is indeed working hard to carry out "technological transformation". In the article "12306's Technological Revolution" published by a domestic IT website, it was pointed out that 12306 began to be transformed from March 2012, transforming the originally adopted Unix minicomputer architecture into a Linux/X86 server cluster architecture through GemFire's distributed memory computing platform, thereby improving the speed of querying remaining tickets. The article points out that after the technical transformation, only more than 10 X86 servers are used to realize the remaining ticket calculation and query capabilities of dozens of small computers, and the maximum time of a single query has dropped from about 15 seconds to less than 0.2 seconds, which is shortened by more than 75 times.
Attentive netizens will find that the above transformation mainly involves the inquiry of the remaining tickets of train tickets. 12306 has to bear hundreds of millions of remaining ticket queries every day during peak periods, which is a great challenge for any website. Given that 12306 does not have pictures, videos, and other content that affects bandwidth, the main contradiction is the high concurrency of the database, and using an in-memory database is the correct solution. We can see that in the past two years, complaints about the inaccurate number of train tickets on the 12306 network have indeed decreased.
However, for the 12306 website that has invested N billion yuan, everyone's expectations are obviously more than these, especially in comparison with domestic B2C e-commerce websites. In the 2013 Taobao "Double 11" shopping carnival, Alipay announced that the number of daily orders was 188 million, and the highest number of orders per minute was 790,000. The data of this year's 12306 is not yet known, and last year's public figure was the highest sale of 300,000 tickets in one hour, which is obviously not as good as Taobao, but the stability is far less.
Of course, train ticket websites have their own unique technical difficulties and cannot be completely compared to Taobao. For example, in terms of inventory, B2C platforms like Taobao, inventory is scattered among various merchants, and there is no need to frequently check inventory, while for the 12306 website, each train ticket is a unique commodity and cannot be ordered at the same time. Taobao also has such data consistency problems, such as Uniqlo oversold in 12 years of "Double 11", but the pressure on the Taobao website will not be as concentrated and frequent as 12306.
In addition, the 12306 website is not an isolated system, and there is a ticketing system shared with train ticket agencies across the country. The railway ticketing system is complex, with agent points all over the country, and it is very difficult to upgrade the old system, and may even involve complex political system issues, which also makes it difficult to improve the response speed of 12306 in the short term.
As the Chinese New Year's Eve approaches, 12306 has ushered in a new wave of ticket grabbing peaks. As the world's busiest e-commerce platform, the 12306 website is under the pressure of hundreds of millions of page views, queries, and millions of people placing orders at the same time, and more importantly, it carries the expectations of the people of the whole country to go home for the New Year. Taobao can't place an order, but it's just one less bargain, and can't buy a train ticket, which will directly affect whether ordinary people can go home for the New Year. In the foreseeable future, the road to technological transformation of 12306 is still a long way off.
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Posted on 1/17/2015 9:44:13 AM
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