IRCTC doubles capacity

The scramble for booking tatkal tickets in the morning should now be a little bit easier, with IRCTC adding two high-capacity servers that have doubled peak-time efficiency. Tatkal reservations on all Indian trains total roughly 4,00,000 tickets (around 2.5 lakh PNRs) and are considered the hardest to book due to their high demand.

The servers have been operational since the night of June 1, IRCTC said in a statement, raising 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, 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.

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. "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.

"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." 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.