IRCTC enhances efficiency of its portal

NEW DELHI, INDIA: IRCTC website has been upgraded with two new high capacity servers aiming to increase the efficiency at peak hours. The website was first upgraded in end-April last year.

The Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation’s (IRCTC) portal installed two Linux-enabled servers on June 1 night, raising the booking capacity to over 14,000 tickets per minute from the existing 7,200.

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.

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 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. ”

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.