The sheep watched the news last night and noticed that this year's Spring Festival had just ended in these two days.
Witnessing the world's largest migration has become a unique cultural phenomenon for our Chinese New Year.
In the past three years, how many treasures have been blocked thousands of miles away due to objective or subjective factors.
The hometown I want to return to, the city I want to visit, it has become a distant place that is difficult to reach.
In this Spring Festival, it was finally achieved fiercely.
According to incomplete statistics, this year's Spring Festival is a big project in which 2.095 billion people participate
。
Among them, sheep have a special focus on a set of data.
The country's 3,285 railway stations, 155,000 kilometers of railway lines, and 42,000 kilometers of high-speed rail lines have welcomed and sent at least 300 million people.
The railway ticket system 12306 sold 385 million tickets.
On the peak day of the return trip on the seventh day of the first lunar month, 13.25 million tickets were sold in a single day, and 1,300 tickets could be sold in 1 second...
For Baozi, who often chooses trains, bullet trains and high-speed trains to go home or travel, the 12306 ticket system has long been an old tool man.
Even if you don't move, WeChat will frequently receive high-speed rail ticket acceleration packages from relatives, friends and colleagues.
But even if you use it for many years, maybe no one cares.
Every time we travel smoothly, we can't do without 12306 carrying the weight for us.
It has more than 600 million registered users and is inseparable from the lives of most people.
It sells more than 4 billion tickets a year and can make eight turns around the globe. It can also kill all scalpers in seconds.
How awesome is this ticket trading system independently developed and established by our Chinese and the world's largest ticket trading system? And listen to the sheep to elaborate.
Source: CCTV "Talking" single apricot flower
Ticket system for 12306
It's not as simple as you think
First of all, Baozi need to clarify a concept, "12306" originally refers to the customer service phone of China Railway.
Later, with the advancement of technology, an Internet ticket management system was built to provide us with channels such as ticket purchase, refund, and ticket exchange, including telephone, website and App at the front desk.
Therefore, the ticket purchase service at the front desk and the complete ticket management system in the background are broadly referred to as 12306.
We ordinary people in 12306, the most used functions are to check the remaining tickets and buy tickets (ticket grabbing).
This ticketing platform, which is inseparable from almost every Chinese, is naturally quite large in terms of the number of users in the first place.
Its number of hits on the peak day of the Spring Festival can reach 149.5 billion times, which is equivalent to 1.7 million clicks per second.
12306 Monitoring Center
This number is too large, and many treasures may have no idea.
For comparison, Google, the world's most visited search engine, Google's daily visits are about 5.6 billion.
Intuitively, Google's daily active hits are less than a fraction of the 12306 ticket system
。
Moreover, 12306 can supply 1 million people and grab 10,000 train tickets at the same time, while ensuring the normal and stable operation of the system.
In layman's terms, millions of people crowd into your door every second, and the threshold of your house is not only not trampled on, but there is no stampede accident.
And the millions of people who pour into your door may have to queue, but only for a short time.
I believe that many Baozi have participated in the zero point second sale of e-commerce's Double 11 and Double 12, right?
Is there often too many people in the queue to squeeze in. After another refresh, the server error page appears.
Imagine that in our university teaching system, hundreds of people can directly paralyze when they choose courses...
These problems 12306 will not exist, because the strong information system architecture on the back end gives a sense of security.
Besides, buying something and buying a ticket are still different.
It is no exaggeration to evaluate that the 12306 ticket system is hundreds of times more complex than a certain treasure e-commerce system.
Everyone knows that e-commerce orders are independent, selling one order minus one inventory.
But we have multiple stops on a train, so each ticket is dynamically linked.
It can be said that the whole body is involved, and it cannot be simply and rudely added or subtracted.
Source: CCTV "Industry Image Journal"
In layman's terms, every time 12306 sells a ticket, the system must calculate the association with this ticket once.
Real-time data updates for all tickets on all routes determine the complexity of the dynamic calculation of remaining tickets.
The specific calculation method can be explained by the example in the figure
Source: CCTV "Industry Image Journal"
The remaining ticket calculation steps are complicated, and real-name authentication, accurate seat checking, and paper-free improvements are added.
and a series of ticketing algorithms to determine whether you know whether you can sit by the window or the aisle when you buy a ticket.
It is equivalent to asking 12306 to do high-level math questions on the spot, and you can't do 1300 questions wrong in 1 second
。
In addition, it also has to guard against third-party ticketing software to cut the queue to ensure that everyone buys tickets on their own.
And all of the above are just a few basic things that the 12306 ticket system serves us.
Behind it, it can also be uniformly allocated train formations, passing stops, stopping times and fare tickets.
It also covers other ticketing channels, real-name ticket verification, ticket entry and exit inspection, train conductor ticket verification, temporary identity certificate and other services.
It can be said that the 12306 ticket system is the most powerful e-commerce service system made by the Chinese official department.
Don't look at the complexity of the back-end operating system to the industry, but the front-end operation interface is very simple.
It greatly facilitates our daily travel and life, no wonder almost every Chinese is inseparable (except Lao Lai)!
However, the former 12306 is not like this.
The invisible tradition of the Spring Festival in those years was not to scold the rotten Spring Festival Gala, but to scold 12306 rotten
。
Before the birth of 12306, tickets could only be purchased offline for the New Year.
You need to roll up the covers early, carry dry food, go to the window of the train station to line up, no matter how anxious you are.
On June 12, 2011, 12306 opened the website ticket purchase business.
The client was launched at the end of 2013 and underwent its first revision in the same year.
Added automatic inquiry, automatic order submission, ticket reminder and other functions.
12306 Schematic diagram of the initial system architecture of construction
After the revision and upgrade, the 12306 will still experience system downtime and crashes from time to time.
When purchasing tickets at the front desk, there are often problems such as flashbacks and not displaying tickets after purchase.
There are also many "scalpers" who switched to online ticket speculation to cut in line to grab tickets, and they were paralyzed as soon as they arrived at the Spring Festival 12306, so they were scolded a lot.
Until 2014, these problems were not well resolved. In 2015, 12306 chose to cooperate with Alibaba Cloud.
They lease public clouds, and together with the railway's private clouds, form the system architecture of hybrid clouds.
During the Spring Festival this year, Alibaba Cloud assumed 75% of the traffic pressure in the 12306 ticket system, mainly for ticket inquiry business.
The 12306 architecture after the second optimization
Soon, 12306 launched a way to select picture verification codes to block technical scalpers from reselling tickets.
Later, the risk control system was gradually upgraded to intercept the intrusion traffic of third-party ticketing software.
Support WeChat Pay in 2017, launch standby function in 2019, and open Alipay mini program in 2020...
Of course, programmers must know best how complicated the 12306 ticketing system really is.
We laymen only need to know that it has been continuously optimized and upgraded to have the world's largest ticket trading system today.
Some people will say that the reason why the 12306 ticket system is powerful and awesome is the credit of Alibaba's technology and servers.
Indeed, with the addition of Alibaba Cloud, the operation of 12306 is more silky.
But the 12306 ticket system is not only a function of rushing tickets during the Spring Festival peak.
Previously, it was rumored that Alibaba provided technical support, which was also denied by the former public relations director of Alibaba Cloud.
Such a partial generalization directly erases the efforts and efforts of the group of people who independently built the 12306 complete information system architecture over the past 30 years.
And the most important technical leader, 12306 chief engineer Shan Xinghua, was the first to refuse.
It was she who witnessed and participated in the whole process of China's railway ticket system from zero to something. Without her, there would be no 12306 today.
Counterattack from the mountains herding cattle babies
The strongest brain of 12306
In March 1974, Shan Xinghua was born in a small mountain village in Wuyuan, Jiangxi Province, with four siblings.
Since the family's only source of income was his father's farming, life was particularly poor.
My brother couldn't afford it until the third year of junior high school, and my sister dropped out of school after finishing the fourth grade.
Shan Xinghua has been herding cattle with her sister since she was 6 years old, and she has to go back and forth 20 miles a day when she goes to elementary school.
Later, she was admitted to the town junior high school 30 miles away, and once a week she walked home to decorate with chili sauce or moldy tofu, which was the week's meal.
As long as there is a holiday, in addition to herding cattle, Shan Xinghua also helps the family with farm work. Hoeing the land, planting vegetables, chopping firewood, planting seedlings, cutting rice, and going deep into the mountains to hunt hogweed, etc.
At the age of 14, she was admitted to Wuyuan No. 2 Middle School, a county key high school 60 miles away from home, and the tuition fee of 99 yuan stumped the whole family.
In my grandmother's opinion, sooner or later a girl will have to get married, and it is useless to read so many books. But Shan Xinghua's father still scraped together money to send her to study.
She went home once a month for three years of high school, eating almost all of them with clumps, sauerkraut, chili sauce, and tofu milk. She does not feel bitter in life, and only thinks about how to learn each subject well and catch up with classmates with better grades every day.
The hard work paid off, and 17-year-old Shan Xinghua was admitted to Xi'an Institute of Technology majoring in computer application and was able to walk out of the mountain.
In the four years of college, she saved money and work-study, and did not dare to relax in her studies, for fear that she would not be able to get a scholarship.
In 1996, at the age of 21, Shan Xinghua continued to enter East China Jiaotong University for graduate studies, majoring in transportation engineering and control.
He enrolled in September, and at the end of September, he was sent to the China Academy of Railway Sciences to participate in the research and development and promotion of the national ticket system (the predecessor of 12306).
Interview with Shan Xinghua characters
At the end of December, four teachers and students of East China Jiaotong University, including Shan Xinghua, were arranged to go to Jiujiang Station to promote the 1.0 version of the ticket system.
Around 2000, 28 teachers and students from 7 colleges and universities who participated in version 1.0 of the ticket system with Shan Xinghua all went their separate ways.
Only she firmly chose to stay, during which a company was willing to poach her at a price 4 times higher than her salary at that time, and her sister was not moved.
The ticket system has gone from version 1.0 to version 5.0, and then to a new generation from manual ticket sales to computer ticket sales, from independent ticket sales at stations to national online ticket sales, and then to railway 12306 Internet ticket sales.
Shan Xinghua, who has no power and only enthusiasm, relies on her own efforts to work hard step by step, from learning assistance to being alone, from hosting and being responsible for overall design.
Later, she won the first prize of National Science and Technology Progress Award for her research and development of China Railway ticket sales and booking system.
She became the chief engineering designer of the Railway Science Institute, the deputy director of the Railway 12306 Science and Technology Innovation Center, the technical leader of China's railway passenger ticket system, and was known as the "strongest brain" of 12306.
This year, she also appeared in the footage of the Spring Festival Gala as the "most beautiful railway man".
But the hard work and results behind this were previously known only to Shan Xinghua and her team. And the sheep felt that it was necessary to be seen by everyone.
The ticket system has been updated and iterated five times, and there are nearly 5,000 stations across the country, with an average of one station system upgrade every 2 days.
So Shan Xinghua and her team colleagues spent a whole decade and traveled all over the country, so that the hard board ticket that had been used for nearly a century withdrew from the historical stage.
In 2005, Shan Xinghua began to preside over the design, development and promotion of the railway ticket system version 5.0.
She led the team to innovate a series of ticket sales organization technologies such as ticket sharing and reuse of remaining ticket adjustments.
That year, she stayed up all night for at least 2 months, because the installation and commissioning of the system needed to be carried out at night.
After the launch of version 5.0, the new feature of Shan Xinghua team will increase the annual revenue of railway passenger transportation by at least 3 billion yuan.
In 2011, Shan Xinghua led the team to develop the railway 12306 Internet ticketing system.
From receiving the task to successfully selling Internet tickets on the Beijing-Tianjin line on June 12, she and her team made it in less than 3 months.
Although it passed smoothly for half a year, including the National Day, the 2012 Spring Festival collapsed 12306.
At that time, the system set a maximum of 1 million tickets sold in a single day, but the real situation far exceeded that number.
Even a simple "remaining ticket query" may be tens of thousands of calculations.
Interview with Shan Xinghua characters
In that happy Spring Festival, Shan Xinghua did not rest.
She and her team did their best to optimize the system to ensure that everyone could go home smoothly.
Every day during the day, she tracks the health of the system, analyzes the most stressed areas, and thinks of solutions.
After the system is discontinued at 11 p.m., the content optimized during the day will be launched and then fully tested.
Go to rest at 3 or 4 a.m., and get up again at 6:30 a.m. to observe the effect of the evening upgrade.
More than 50 days of Spring Festival, all worked overtime in this way, and also independently developed a queuing system.
As soon as the Spring Festival ended, Shan Xinghua and the team continued to tackle technical problems.
The core system of 12306 has been optimized in five aspects, and a series of methods and technologies have been developed that are the only in the world.
Shan Xinghua also completed her doctorate degree in transportation planning and management at the Iron Science Institute that year.
How did you do both career and study? Ask my sister to start a class and talk about time management!
In addition to ensuring that we can buy tickets, Shan Xinghua and her team also have to fight against "scalpers".
Now the scalpers are actually some third-party ticket-grabbing software, peddling acceleration packages and various types of insurance under the guise of the official, and there is a risk of leaking personal information.
(Say who the sheep will not be named)
And the ticket-grabbing machine they engaged in clicks dozens or even hundreds of times faster than the manpower.
Damn, let's just say how we can't buy tickets!
In this regard, Shan Xinghua and his team developed the 12306 risk control system to reject and block suspected ticket-grabbing traffic.
After a series of technical iterations and optimizations, our experience with 12306 is getting better and better.
Few people know that in order to ensure the continuous optimization and upgrading of the system, Shan Xinghua, who often stays up all night, suffers from congenital heart disease.
Although she has only tried her best to do her job for 30 years, she has ensured our peace and reunion every time.
Aren't these worth boasting about?
Girls can't learn mathematics, physics and chemistry?
Those "invisible" technical women
The Internet is an interesting place, and some bloggers have posted articles praising apricot blossoms.
But she will be chased to diss to give her the credit, she stole Ali's merits.
Some have even erased the growth and progress of China's railway ticket system from zero to some in the past 30 years.
What the hell are they afraid of?
Is there a difference between their jumping up and down and the stigma that says that girls can't learn mathematics, physics and chemistry, and girls are not good at logical thinking?
There is a difference, but not much.
When it comes to programmers who do technical architecture and information systems, most people's stereotypes will be that boys are good at it.
But a hot knowledge: Ada Lovelace, the world's first programmer, is a woman.
She was also the founder of computer programs, developing algorithms for computational programs, writing the first programming flowcharts, and establishing loops and subroutine concepts.
Later, a high-level computer programming language was named "Ada" in honor of Ada Lovelace.
Grace Murray Hope, the third programmer of the world's first large-scale digital computer, is a woman.
She created the first modern compiler A-0 system, as well as the commercial computer programming language COBOL.
There is also the term "bug" in the computer industry today, which she originally said to represent program failure.
NASA's asynchronous processing system for lunar landings was also written by female programmer Margaret Hamilton.
She was the lead developer of the Apollo program and also created the core idea of computer programming, 10 years before Microsoft appeared.
There is also Yu Guoli of Hong Kong, the lead game engine programmer on Microsoft's Halo team.
The first and only female executive at Microsoft Game Studios.
Shan Xinghua and their existence are to break the stereotype that girls are not good at mathematics and physics, and men have stronger thinking and logic ability.
It is to prove to the world that women's abilities are not bad at all, and female programmers can also be very good!
They have created and rewritten history, and they should not be selectively invisible.
The sheep must not only praise them, but also praise them!