Alipay Double 11: 544,000 TPS Architecture Explained Answer-first: Alipay sustains 544,000 payment transactions per second (TPS) and 61 million database queries per second (QPS) using a cell-based Local Deployment Center (LDC) unitization topology, OceanBase’s LSM-tree Paxos consensus engine, sub-account sharding for hot-merchant ledgers, and RocketMQ 2-phase transactional messaging.
graph TD
User["Global User Traffic"] --> GSLB["Global Server Load Balancer (GSLB)"]
subgraph Cell_East_1 ["RZone East-01 (Users 00-19)"]
App_E1["Payment Service Fleet"]
OB_E1["OceanBase Primary Shard (Paxos Leader)"]
App_E1 --> OB_E1
end
subgraph Cell_East_2 ["RZone East-02 (Users 20-39)"]
App_E2["Payment Service Fleet"]
OB_E2["OceanBase Primary Shard (Paxos Leader)"]
App_E2 --> OB_E2
end
subgraph Core_Zone ["CZone (Central Settlement & Hot-Merchant Split Ledgers)"]
CZone_App["Core Accounting Engine"]
OB_Core["OceanBase Central Shard (Double-Entry Ledger)"]
CZone_App --> OB_Core
end
GSLB -->|"hash(user_id) % 100 < 20"| App_E1
GSLB -->|"hash(user_id) % 100 < 40"| App_E2
App_E1 -->|"Async Settle via RocketMQ 2PC"| CZone_App
App_E2 -->|"Async Settle via RocketMQ 2PC"| CZone_App
style Cell_East_1 fill:#f0f9ff,stroke:#0284c7,stroke-width:2px
style Cell_East_2 fill:#ecfdf5,stroke:#059669,stroke-width:2px
style Core_Zone fill:#fef3c7,stroke:#d97706,stroke-width:2px 1. Research Baseline: Dissecting 544k TPS vs 61M QPS A common error in distributed systems write-ups is conflating transaction throughput with order creation and database queries:
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