Chess.com Chooses Azul Zing to Enhance Real-Time Gaming Experience

World's largest online chess site eradicates multi-second application pauses by deploying Zing


SUNNYVALE, CALIFORNIA--(Marketwired - April 26, 2016) -

News Highlights:

  • Zing removed Chess.com's application stalls, improved reliability, and enhanced players' experience to provide a better infrastructure for continued growth
  • No changes to the application or hardware configuration were required
  • Zing eliminates the need for ongoing Java platform tuning, allowing Chess.com to focus more on quality of service and deployment of new features for its millions of users

Azul Systems (Azul), the award-winning leader in Java runtime solutions, today announced that Chess.com, the world's largest online chess site with more than 14 million members, has deployed Zing®, Azul's Java Virtual Machine (JVM) designed for systems that require consistent performance and predictable latency. Chess.com uses Azul Zing to power its Java-based infrastructure and eliminates application stalls and slashes peak latency to levels unachievable using a legacy JVM.

With over one million games played every day and thousands of chess moves handled every second, system-induced stalls in game flow can severely impact user loyalty and degrade the overall gaming experience. Despite extensive tuning efforts, Chess.com was suffering from Java's infamous "Stop-The-World" (STW) garbage collection pauses, which were causing multi-second application delays and impacting user response time. By simply replacing the legacy JVM with Zing, Chess.com completely eliminated these problematic pauses and stalls and greatly improved their end user experience.

Erik Allebest, CEO at Chess.com, said: "Blitz games can have hundreds of moves a minute, which means that we need maximum speed and consistency in our Java applications to ensure the best possible customer experience. Zing has clearly reduced our application response time and has eliminated painful garbage collection pauses, with no changes to our application or hardware infrastructure. It is also an extremely stable solution."

Scott Sellers, CEO of Azul Systems, said: "Zing is a fast, reliable, and scalable Java runtime used by hundreds of companies worldwide and proven in their most important applications. Gaming is an ultra-competitive market, so using Zing gives providers like Chess.com a unique advantage by improving the end user experience without exhaustive tuning and requires no change to the application. In an industry like gaming where there is a constant need for new features and capabilities, Zing is the perfect fit."

Request a free evaluation copy of Zing at www.azul.com/trial.

About Chess.com

Chess.com was founded in 2005. Today, it hosts more than one million chess games every day, employs more than 70 people as programmers, content editors, and member support. For additional information, visit www.chess.com.

About Azul Systems

@azulsystems

Azul Systems, the industry's only company exclusively focused on Java and the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), builds fully supported, certified standards-compliant Java runtime solutions that help enable the real time business. Zing is a JVM designed for enterprise Java applications and workloads that require any combination of low latency, high transaction rates, large working memory, and/or consistent response times. Zulu and Zulu Embedded are Azul's certified, open source builds of OpenJDK with a variety of flexible support options, available in configurations for the enterprise as well as custom and embedded form factors. For additional information, visit www.azul.com.

Azul Systems, the Azul Systems logo, Zulu, Zing and ReadyNow! are registered trademarks. Java and OpenJDK are trademarks of Oracle Corporation and/or its affiliated companies in the United States and other countries. All other trademarks are the property of their respective holders.

Contact Information:

For Azul Systems:
Howard Green
VP Marketing
+1 650 230 6616
hgreen@azul.com
Twitter: @azulsystems

Darren Cottom
750 MPH
+44 (0) 1295 713172
+44 (0) 7713 652216
darren@750-mph.com
Twitter: @darrencottom