Alipay Sets Record 85,900 Transactions per Second During 2015 Double‑11, Leveraging OceanBase and Hybrid Cloud Architecture

In the 2015 Double‑11 event, Alipay handled a peak of 85,900 transactions per second, more than twice the 38,500 tps peak of the previous year and exceeding the laboratory test figures of Visa (56,000 tps) and MasterCard (40,000 tps). This performance made Alipay the world’s most capable payment platform.

The high‑throughput capability is powered by Ant Financial’s proprietary financial cloud, the OceanBase distributed database, and a hybrid cloud architecture. In October 2015, Ant Financial opened its financial cloud to external institutions, allowing banks to benefit from the same technology.

Chief Technology Officer Cheng Li explained that OceanBase, developed in‑house for five years, now handles 100 % of Alipay’s transactions, offering at least a 50 % cost advantage over traditional commercial databases. The system also supports multi‑active data centers across South and East China, enabling seamless scaling to potentially 100 billion daily payments.

Additional innovations include the Ant Huabei credit product, which achieved a 100 % success rate with an average payment time of 0.035 seconds, and a hybrid cloud deployment that dynamically allocates resources on Alibaba Cloud during peak periods, improving economic and environmental efficiency.

Beyond payment processing, Ant Financial applies data‑intelligence techniques to its customer service system, achieving over 99 % call‑connect rates. The overall achievement demonstrates the maturity of China’s payment and financial infrastructure and validates the effectiveness of large‑scale distributed systems, cloud computing, and big‑data technologies.