Customer story
E-CARD Scales Online Betting to 100K Queries per Second with MariaDB
After hitting performance limits on MySQL, E-CARD moved its betting platform to MariaDB and now handles up to 100,000 queries per second on a single node, with more than 10,000 live clients at peak and gameplay responses under 150 milliseconds.
About E-CARD
E-CARD Ltd. is a Bulgarian software product company that has been operating since 2000 with a tech stack based entirely on open-source products. Initially succeeding with Internet Access Services and web/SMS services for major TV shows like Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? and Big Brother, E-CARD later transitioned into the online betting business as a B2B solutions provider. The company offers platforms for complete online betting website solutions and in-house casino games, rapidly establishing a market presence across four continents.
The Challenge
In the highly demanding online gaming and casino sector, platforms must deliver exceptionally fast and consistent performance to satisfy users. E-CARD needed to serve web pages and initialize games in just 100 milliseconds, and handle ongoing gameplay actions with responses consistently under 150 milliseconds. With thousands of clients performing parallel requests and millions of bets processed daily, the database size grew continuously. In 2020, E-CARD hit disruptive performance bottlenecks with their previous MySQL 5.7 infrastructure, making it critical to find a database solution capable of scaling seamlessly without sacrificing response speed.
“MariaDB works alongside us to continuously optimize our performance for our betting applications… The MariaDB team is extremely responsive and knowledgeable, and we are happy with our relationship with them. Together, working with MariaDB, we have made significant progress in improving database performance for our applications.”
Rumen Palov
CTO, E-CARD Ltd.
The Solution
To overcome its performance challenges, E-CARD migrated its infrastructure to MariaDB Server 10.5 and subsequently upgraded to MariaDB Enterprise Server 10.6, establishing a critical enterprise subscription. E-CARD deployed a robust infrastructure consisting of several MariaDB Galera Clusters. Each database node is highly optimized, equipped with over 80 hardware cores, more than 3TB of RAM, and multiple 20TB SSD storage units.
Furthermore, E-CARD’s technical team partnered closely with MariaDB specialists to continuously optimize the setup, resolve internal bottlenecks, and rapidly apply emergency patches. This deep collaboration and the robust architecture of MariaDB enabled E-CARD to comfortably handle explosive data growth while maintaining ultra-low latency for its betting applications.
Future Outlook
As Flightradar24 continues to expand its global footprint, MariaDB Cloud provides a flexible foundation that scales alongside the platform. Looking ahead, the engineering team is currently evaluating advanced MariaDB capabilities, including serverless architectures and emerging agentic AI features, to further innovate how they process and deliver real-time global aviation intelligence.
More like this
Recommended customer stories
Get started
Start building with MariaDB
One real-time database platform you can trust, for everything you run today and everything you build next.
