How Tencent’s TDMQ Pulsar Powers the Massive Messaging Needs of Honor of Kings

Background: Honor of Kings

Honor of Kings, developed by Tencent Games, is a top‑ranking MOBA mobile game on Android and iOS launched in November 2015. With billions of users and tens of millions of daily active users, the game generates massive amounts of real‑time messages such as friend notifications, game start signals, gold gifts, and core transaction flows.

Message‑Queue Selection Challenge

These high‑volume, bursty traffic patterns require a middleware that can decouple upstream and downstream components, provide flexible scalability, and ensure reliable delivery. The development team evaluated several options and chose Tencent Cloud TDMQ Pulsar edition for its cloud‑native, serverless characteristics.

TDMQ Pulsar Product Overview

TDMQ for Apache Pulsar (referred to as TDMQ Pulsar) is a self‑developed message‑queue service built on Apache Pulsar. It offers compute‑storage separation, strong cloud‑native support, and serverless capabilities. In addition to full compatibility with the open‑source Pulsar, it adds advanced features such as retry & dead‑letter queues, tag‑based filtering, and message tracing.

Major customers include Honor of Kings, Maoyan, Weimin Insurance, QQ Music, Lingxing, and Changan Auto, as well as Tencent Billing’s core payment, real‑time reconciliation, monitoring, and big‑data analytics pipelines.

Application in Honor of Kings

4.1 Elastic Scaling

The compute‑storage separation architecture makes TDMQ Pulsar highly elastic and cloud‑native, allowing rapid horizontal scaling without service interruption. Adding broker nodes handles compute‑intensive workloads, while new storage nodes (BK) address storage bottlenecks. Hot upgrades are transparent to the game.

4.2 Publish‑Subscribe Model

Honor of Kings exhibits a high producer‑to‑consumer ratio (often >1:2). TDMQ Pulsar supports multiple subscription modes and tag‑based filtering, enabling different consumers to receive only relevant messages from the same topic, simplifying business logic for UI actions, game start, and gold gifting.

4.3 Real‑Time Transaction Processing

For in‑game purchases and lotteries, the system must deduct user balances, then trigger delivery. The workflow requires guaranteed message delivery, retry capability for long business chains, and delayed messages for status checks. TDMQ Pulsar satisfies these needs with three‑replica quorum storage, retry and dead‑letter queues, and native delayed‑message support.

Key guarantees include:

Three‑copy storage with quorum consistency prevents message loss.

Retry and dead‑letter queues enable custom retry policies and manual handling of permanently failed messages.

Server‑side delayed messages eliminate client‑side timing logic, reducing implementation complexity.

User Evaluation

Tag‑based subscription reduces filtering overhead and boosts per‑module throughput, lowering hardware costs. Namespace‑level rate limiting simplifies global traffic control, avoiding separate distributed rate‑limiting components. Production/consumption rates have exceeded 400 k messages per second per cluster, with seamless scaling and minimal latency growth. Integrated monitoring and alerting provide near‑real‑time visibility of cluster health.