Thousands of DebitCredit Transactions-Per-Second: Easy and Inexpensive

A $2k computer can execute about 8k transactions per second. This is 80x more than one of the largest US bank’s 1970’s traffic – it approximates the total US 1970’s financial transaction volume. Very modest modern computers can easily solve yesterday’s problems. 1. A Thousand-Transactions-per-second was once difficult and expensive. In 1973, Bank of America wanted to convert their paper-based branches, tellers, and demand-deposit (savings) accounts to an online system, letting tellers perform a customer’s deposits and withdrawals. The corresponding transaction profile, called DebitCredit, evolved to become a standard measure of transaction processing [Serlin]. At the time, the system of ten thousand tellers needed to perform 100 transactions per second. The ten million account records were about 1GB and the 90-day general ledger was about 4GB. At the time, the server hardware for such a system cost more than ten million dollars; but, it was not until 1976 that a commercial database system was able to run 100 transactions per second [Gawlick]. A decade later, Tandem used a 34-CPU 86-disk SQL system costing ten million dollars to process 208transactions per second. At the time, this was considered a breakthrough because relational systems had a reputation for poor performance [Tandem]. For much of the 1980’s the database and transaction processing performance agenda was to achieve a thousand transactions per second. Part of that process defined the “one-transaction per second” unit. Informal definitions [Datamation], [1Ktps] and bench-marketing eventually led to the formation of the Transaction Processing Performance Council (www.tpc.org) which defined the TPC-A transaction profile largely in line with DebitCredit [Serlin]. By early 1990 several database systems had achieved the 1,000 tps milestone. By the late 1990’s, clusters of 100 machines were delivering over 10,000 tpsA [Scalability]. Long before then, TPCA was replaced by the more challenging TPC-C benchmark [TPC-C], [Levine]. TPC-C had a similar experience. The early systems delivered 1k tpmC at 2000$/tpmC, today systems are delivering about to 3M tpmC for about 5$/tpmC.