12306 Real-site cost survey: cost only 100 million but consume 500 million

A tender purchase contract, the 12306 Web site again pushed to the cusp.

Recently, a media report said, Taiji group to undertake 12306 Web site projects Two contracts were exposed, the contract amounted to 200 million yuan, plus the previous burst Tai Chi group and the same party group won the bid 12306 sites, the winning amount is 199 million yuan and 130 million yuan respectively. At this point, 12306 of the site cost more than 500 million yuan.

"According to the 12306 Web site traffic and order volume requirements to calculate, uttered, the total cost of building this site spent more than 100 million yuan, the maximum does not need more than 200 million yuan." "The technical director of a well-known electric dealer's website said in an evaluation of the matter to this reporter.

The person in charge thinks that the huge cost of 12306 websites is an "economic" behavior. 12306 The visit peak of the website only the spring Festival and National Day two times each year, the use frequency is too low. Therefore, 12306 site can open the interface, so that Taobao, Jingdong, Ctrip and other electric companies to help sell tickets, so you can save a lot of resources.

Minimum 100 million stations to build

Generally speaking, the cost of establishing a website is approximately in the hardware (server, database), software, artificial development and so on.

The above well-known electric dealer website Technical Director to calculate a sum of accounts: according to the 12306 Web site traffic scale, hardware part of the server needs more than 1000 units, a server to the average price of 50,000 ~10 million, then the cost of the purchase of the server at 50 million ~ billion. The database is generally calculated by the number of CPUs, generally a more than 200,000 yuan, may use 32 CPU or 64 bits, this part of the money needs 10 million. The software component costs 10 million ~2000 million. In addition to these costs to buy, the remaining is labor costs, almost 2000 months (software industry, such as the work of the law, such as 200 people working 10 months), 40 million ~5000 million will suffice.

If the site for security, stability requirements are high, then add a layer of firewalls, this soft and hard combination of firewalls spent 10 million ~2000 million. At this point, the cost of 200 million yuan, 12306 site is luxurious configuration.

However, according to the current media exposure, 12306 of the total cost of the site more than 500 million yuan. According to media reports, December 18, 2010, Tai Chi Group and the Ministry of Railways signed a "Railway customer service Center information System of the Ministry of Railways," the first phase of the contract is 54.51 million yuan; May 18, 2011, Tai Chi Group and the Ministry of Railways signed a sum of more than 146 million yuan. Ministry of Railways stage two project Internet ticketing section "project. Earlier, in 2011, Tai Chi shares and shares issued a notice said that two companies have won the Railway ministry "a new generation of ticket system project", the winning bidder is 199 million yuan and 130 million yuan respectively.

Originally only need to spend 200 million yuan 12306 websites, why finally spend more than 500 million yuan? Public reports in the media say 12306 of websites are being purchased as a "self-circulation" of the Ministry of Railways. Taiji Company to 12306 sites to provide system integration, software development operation and maintenance services, but its procurement of products from the Sino-iron Letter, China Railway Information Technology Center, such as the Ministry of the company. Moreover, the layers of bidding also breed a lot of corrupt space.

Earlier, the media reported publicly that IBM had given 12306 websites to build a set of consulting programs, but not by 12306 Web sites adopted. In this respect, the software industry, said this is normal in the software industry, international IT companies into the government industry is mostly "curve salvation." The 12306 Web site's servers are provided by IBM, Dell, HP three, and storage is provided by EMC. "Many government industries in China have some state-owned, local system integrators, but these systems are often just a ' porter ' role, with servers, databases, and parts of the software using products from international IT companies," he said. ”

12306 website This project is also twists. "A close to 12306 website of the industry told the reporter, after Liu Zhijun in the Ministry of Railways Minister, once the 12306 of the project press not hair." Then, after Liu Zhijun stepped down, 12306 of the website's project was launched. June 1, 2011, 12306 website trial run, selling train tickets for high-speed trains and trains. January 1, 2012, 12306 Rob in the Spring Festival before the official launch.

Change System architecture

Although spent more than 500 million yuan, but 12306 of the site's user experience is very general, which also gave the ticket software to live space.

"From the observation point of view, 12306 Web sites this year still adopt a centralized server architecture, and did not take the distributed architecture of the Internet." "The Internet technology engineer told reporters that the 2012 Spring Festival, a large number of visits to the centralized architecture of the 12306 Web site into paralysis, this year although the addition of servers, users can log on normally, but the architecture itself still makes the server pressure is relatively large."

Unlike the Internet, railway systems tend to be based on government industries, with security, stability, and general use of servers such as IBM minicomputer, and databases tend not to use open source, but rather to purchase Oracle databases, a database server that can cost 200,000 of dollars. This is partly because of the high cost of hardware, which leads to higher costs of building websites. On the other hand, the processing capacity of a single server is strong, there are bottlenecks, in the face of the internet's large traffic concurrency, but can not expand to decompose the pressure.

For example, train tickets will have a lot of query operations, such as check time, seats, bunks, a trip does not work, and then check another. With a large number of query operations, the order of the time required to operate the database. This means that the server needs to make an interactive response every time a user queries. And the request of hundreds of millions of times per second, it is likely to let the site crash. These technical issues, 12306 sites are not currently resolved.

For 12306 of the technical problems of the website, the Netizen "University 001" set up a "12306ng.org" open source project group, here accommodated 12,000 technical engineers, from the interaction, the ticket pool and other 10 modes to provide advice to 12306. The project group's biggest objective is open source.

An Internet technical engineer at the 12306NG Open source project group said that the booking system was similar to that of the electric Dealer's order system, which required complete inventory operations such as "Occupy Inventory", "Pay (optional)" and "Deduct inventory". And, the electrical business site has many categories, and 12306 of the site only booking a category, in the broadband, concurrency, data interaction, the experience of the electronic business site is richer, 12306 can learn from the electrical business website.

and a CDN industry technical engineer told the reporter, before, 12306 of the site's technicians have with Alibaba's technical engineers have had exchanges, Ali also suggested that 12306 Web sites using internet companies commonly used distributed it.

"It investment is not one-time, next, the annual operation, equipment updates will cost a lot of money." An Internet technology engineer said that, because of the specificity of 12306 websites, spending a lot of money may not be effective.

Open-Side solution challenges

Although the number of Internet ticketing has not changed much compared with last year, the number of tickets and the amount of visitors to the site has improved a lot. Data from the WSA monitoring platform showed that the peak daily hits of 12306 sites (daily requests) exceeded 10 billion, and the number of clicks increased by 3 times times over last year.

A good change is that this year, with a high level of traffic, 12306 sites are not paralysed. Network host science and technology related responsible person told reporter, this year, 12306 website uses the net to host technology WSA Whole station acceleration plan. Not only can the text, pictures and other static content to speed up, but also for booking, more votes query and other dynamic interactive applications for the acceleration of the transmission process. This lets the face "flood" the amount of visit, 12306 website basically can log in normally.

But the grim thing is that in just two years, online ticketing has become an important window for the Railway ministry to sell tickets. According to the Ministry of Railways, Transport Bureau, the relevant responsible person, at present in each ticket channel, the internet accounted for 34%, telephone booking accounted for 4.3%, the station window accounted for 38.6%, consignment point accounted for 18.5%, automatic ticket machine accounted for 4.6%. This year, the Internet to buy tickets 20 days in advance, offline purchase of tickets 18 days in advance. In that case, 12306 sites will be the first to take the ticket.

Not only that, the train ticket is the time period to put the ticket system, in the supply is far less than the case, will produce a lot of ticket behavior. So at the moment of the ticket, millions of, even tens of millions of people at the same time to repeatedly query. During the Spring Festival in 2012, railway tickets were mainly concentrated at 8, 10, 15, three. And this year, the national 12306 site of the time divided into 10 time period, although to a certain extent cushion the ticket to bring the access pressure, but ultimately palliative.

"This year is the second year to use the Internet booking, the user clicks on the increase of three times times, next year's Spring festival will increase more." "A CDN (content distribution Network) industry's technical engineers believe that if 12306 of the site every year to buy hardware, continuous expansion, then it investment will be a bottomless pit, very economic.

"Train tickets should be as open as air tickets, allowing people to buy tickets with more Internet access," said one person in charge of the electronic ticketing. ”

Previously, the Beijing-East test network sold train tickets by the Ministry of Railways a paper order to stop, with Cheng network, as well as other online sales train tickets and other sites have been in the "Buthen" state. Other than 12306, it is impossible to sell tickets to other websites.

The above mentioned well-known electric dealer website Technical person proposal, 12306 website can make open, let the Internet website to 12306 website Inquiry Service carries on the diversion. In fact, 12306 Web sites only need to receive the booking of successful train tickets related data interaction can be, and this part of the data transmission can be delayed.

It is worth mentioning is that 12306 of the usual visits to the site are relatively small, just the Spring Festival, National Day and other holidays, a rapid surge in the number of clicks. The company's technical director suggested that, "in the future, 12306 of the Web site using cloud Leasing mode to do, the usual, 12306 sites only need to maintain normal operation is good, once to the Spring Festival, National Day and other visits peak, leasing cloud services can be completed." ”