IRCTC website gets 4x faster, books 7200 tickets per minute !

Indian Railway Online Ticketing service provider IRCTC shall book over 7200 tickets per minute, if the steps taken by Government to modernize and improve the system turns out to be successful. There would be 4x increase in the present e-ticketing speed of IRCTC website which is less than 2000 tickets per minute.

Reports say that a Next Generation e-ticketing system is under development by Centre for Railway Information Systems (CRIS)  and it would be implemented  on Indian Railway Catering & Tourism Corporation Ltd. (IRCTC) website which would support 7200 e-tickets per minute.

The existing system supports booking of  less than  2,000 tickets per minute. The official e-ticket booking website of the IRCTC often crashes due to overloading. The new system would support 1,20,000 simultaneous users at any point in time against the present capacity of 40,000 users.

This would have high performance and seamless access even at peak time and have high availability and business continuity, scalability to cater to future growth and security to prevent frauds and unauthorized access. The estimated cost  of the entire project is Rs. 68.97 crore.
Voices about new System were first echoed during the Rail Budget 2013, when Rail Minister Pawan Bansal said, “”By the end of this calendar year, we will put in place a next generation e-ticketing system which will bring about a paradigm shift in internet rail ticketing by significantly improving the end-user experience in respect of ease of use, response time as well as capacity,” he said.”

Additionally, to minimise to the server problems while booking online tickets,e IRCTC, has come out with a scheme named Rolling Deposit Scheme (RDS). Under this,  a person can  transfer some amount (around Rs.1500) to IRCTC account in advance, which can be used for ticket booking at the peak hours when the server traffic goes high.

The IRCTC officials have told the media that this scheme was specifically designed to overcome ticketing blues. They were of the opinion that many people were unable to book tatkal tickets timely due to the issues from payment gateways and their online banking server problems.