Improving response time of authorization process of credit card system using multi-threading and shared-memory pool techniques

Abstract

Current credit card authorization was developed on single-threaded model whereby authentication process takes longer time to respond due to sequential process of card's risk management profile and its limitation of handling huge number of simultaneous transactions at single point of time. As a result, the performance of the authorization system was affected during peak hours. This study presented an architectural framework and prototype of credit card authorization system using multi-threading and shared memory pool techniques in order to improve the response time during authorization process. Through multi-threading technique, each worker thread will be assigned with several child threads to perform online fraud validation concurrently, depending on numbers of cryptographic elements presented in transaction message. Meanwhile, the worker threads itself performed card restriction validation based on the information stored in card's shared memory pool. This approach was implemented to reduce the idle time while waiting for slow cryptographic operation in each I/O operations that is performed through external device and to accelerate the authorization process through memory operation instead of accessing similar information from database. The implementation of these techniques, were then measured in terms of response time. The results showed that the performance of multi-threaded authentication engine was almost double of single-threaded authentication engine and the number of credit card authorization that can be processed using shared memory was ten percent higher than the number of credit card authorization that can be processed using database at single point of time. © 2008 Science Publications.