300 to 500 tickets per second, with a peak of about 1,000, and users only need 28 seconds; The highest number of tickets sold in a single day was 209010,000 and the highest number of visits reached 838800 million ......The curtain of the 2024 Spring Festival officially kicked off a few days ago. What is the situation of railway ticket sales for the Spring Festival this year? How to ensure the ticket purchase needs of the majority of passengers? What are the new measures in terms of service? With these questions, the reporter walked into the railway 12306 science and technology innovation center.
Pushing open the gate of the ticket monitoring center of the railway 12306 science and technology innovation center, a huge screen comes into view, on which the 12306 real-time ticket sales data is beating. The left and right sides of the large screen also display core businesses such as remaining ticket inquiries, as well as extended services such as on-board catering. As you can see from the big screen, Guangzhou, Chongqing, Beijing, Wuhan, Zhengzhou and other cities are at the top of the list of popular arrival cities.
In front of the operating table, more than 50 staff members stared at their respective computer screens, paying attention to the operation of the system at any time, and the atmosphere was tense and busy but orderly. A small office has become the "heart" to ensure the smooth and orderly operation of the world's largest ticketing system.
Here during the day, the backbone technicians and on-duty support personnel are on duty together, and the monitoring personnel are responsible for system data processing at night. The staff work in shifts, monitor around the clock, and are on duty 24 hours a day. Shan Xinghua, deputy director of the railway 12306 science and technology innovation center, told reporters that since the start of railway spring transportation ticket sales on January 12, as of January 27, railway 12306 has sold nearly 2 train tickets700 million, including 12,743 tickets during the Spring Festival70,000, a year-on-year increase of 1165%。
The 2024 Railway Spring Festival is the first normalized Spring Festival transportation after the smooth transition of the epidemic, and there is a strong demand for passengers to buy tickets for travel. According to data from the National Railway Group, the railway is expected to send 4800 million passengers, with a daily average of 12 million passengers, an increase of 37 compared with the Spring Festival in 20239%。
In the face of such "ultra-large traffic", the 12306 technical team has made preparations early on, focusing on system resource reinforcement, public cloud applications, network bandwidth expansion, and preventing malicious ticket grabbing to ensure the stable and efficient operation of the ticketing system.
After we strengthened the system resources, there was a 5 to 10 times increase compared to the daily operation. Wang Tuo, associate researcher of the Railway 12306 Science and Technology Innovation Center, said.
At the same time, a series of new functions launched by Railway 12306 for the Spring Festival transportation this year have also made it more convenient to purchase tickets, such as pre-filling ticket purchase requirements, greatly increasing the upper limit of the number of waitlists, and launching the reservation service for students and migrant groups.
Compared with the traditional step-by-step ticket purchase, the pre-filling function has changed the steps from 6 steps to 2 steps, and the time has been shortened from 10 to 12 seconds to 18 seconds; Shan Xinghua also said that the railway 12306 has increased the number of standby orders and alternatives, and can submit up to 6 pending reservation orders, and each reservation order can submit 20 different "train number + seats" on the same travel date.
It is worth noting that in recent years, some passengers will use third-party software to grab tickets. Shan Xinghua pointed out that third-party software not only poses a threat to the security of personal information, but also undermines the fairness of the ticketing environment. Railway 12306 will take precautions against third-party ticket-grabbing software, use big data technology to identify and intercept "ticket-grabbing robots", and put them into the "slow queue".
We appeal to passengers to use the official channel of Railway 12306 to purchase tickets. For passengers who have not yet purchased a ticket, we recommend using the standby function of 12306, which allows you to choose 3 different dates and up to 60 combinations of different trains and seats, and if you choose to accept new trains, you can further improve the success rate. Shan Xinghua said that the railway department will also further tap the transportation potential according to the waitlist situation, arrange passenger trains, and meet the travel needs of passengers to a greater extent. (Reporter Li Yuyou Wang Lu).