The scramble for booking Tatkal tickets in the morning hours will now be a thing of the past. It will now be considerably ease to book Tatkal tickets as IRCTC has upgraded its website by introducing two high-capacity servers that have doubled peak-time efficiency. The tatkal reservations on all Indian trains total roughly 4,00,000 tickets (around 2.5 lakh PNRs), and it was a hell of a job to book them the moment slot opened at 10AM.
The Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation’s (IRCTC) portal installed two Linux-enabled servers on Ist June, which raised the booking capacity to over 14,000 tickets per minute from the existing 7,200. The capacity augmentation has been done as an “immediate step” to cater to the summer-time demand for tatkal tickets and a forenoon flurry in their online reservation, revealed IRCTC Chairman and Managing Director Dr A K Manocha.
“The positive results are already showing,” he pointed out. “The measure is vital, considering that 54% train tickets in the country are booked through IRCTC website.” The average daily sale of train tickets through the portal, which is the world’s second busiest with 3 crore registered users, is around 5.5 to 6 lakh. It has registered a record 14,800 tickets per minute.
“Even that was later found insufficient, given the summer-time rush for tatkal tickets—especially in premium trains plying between the most sought-after destinations,” pointed out the CMD of the 1999-founded IRCTC, which is also into railway food catering and tourism promotion. “The two HP Itanium servers have now helped raise the capacity of concurrent connections to 3,00,000, while the facility for enquiries has trebled to 3,000 per minute. Logging in on the IRCTC’s website has become smoother and more efficient. ”
IRCTC had introduced e-ticketing in 2002 through its digital platform. The website was first upgraded in end-April last year, facilitating 1,50,000 concurrent connections (users at a time) and the ability to entertain 1,000 enquiries per second.
With the addition of two new servers, IRCTC has now 17 servers while the existing 1.4 GB bandwidth has increased by 25 per cent. On April 1 this year, when advance reservation period was made 120 days, IRCTC improved its national record by enabling booking of 13,45,000 tickets.
