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 percent
