IRCTC’s new servers are here to increase ticketing and texting capacity, and enquiry processing—in short making your train bookings easier. IRCTC’s new servers are here to increase ticketing and texting capacity, and enquiry processing—in short making your train bookings easier.Ever wondered why booking a tatkal ticket with the Indian Railways is a hit-or-miss affair? The booking window for a tatkal ticket is open between 10 am to 10:15 am. This 15-minute timespan sees about 800,000 to 1,000,000 people trying to log in to the IRCTC website.Out of these, only 330,000 to 350,000 users are able to get through. “We face maximum load during the tatkal booking window. We’re able to process around 7000 tickets per minute during this phase,” says Sunil Kumar, group GM-IT, IRCTC.However, railway passengers can now find it easier to book tickets online. The Indian Railways Catering and Tourism Corporation has purchased two high-capacity HP Itanium servers, which would increase the booking capacity to over 14,000 tickets per minute from the existing 7000. Currently, IRCTC uses N-Jet servers to cater to the 300,000-odd users logging in. “The texting capacity of the existing servers stands at 2000 tickets per minute. The addition of two new servers would boost that to 15,000 tickets per minute,” says Kumar.However, IRCTC has more in store for us. “We’ve placed the order to import five additional HP Itanium servers, and they will be delivered by the end of this month,” says Narendra Patil, chief public relations officer, Central Railways. The additional servers will be used to deal with the number of enquiries processed by the IRCTC website. With 54 percent of train tickets being booked online, the IRCTC website hosts 150,000 concurrent users.Currently, IRCTC is able to deal with 1000 enquiries per second. The addition of these servers would enable the website to process 3500 enquiries per second. The five new servers will also be able to further increase the ticket booking capacity.“We haven’t yet compiled the information on how many tickets we can process per minute, but we expect this number to increase drastically,” said Sunil Kumar.With the addition of two new servers, IRCTC now has 17 servers while the existing 1.4 GB bandwidth has increased by 25 percent.The cost of these servers, although not specified, will be borne from the company’s existing funds. Related content brandpost Sponsored by NTT DATA Transform your technology and accelerate business outcomes with NTT DATA’s Technology Solutions By Miriam Murphy, Chief Executive Officer at NTT, Europe Dec 06, 2023 4 mins Digital Transformation brandpost Sponsored by SAP How the cloud and AI will help more companies become future proof In a world where macroeconomic uncertainty has become the new normal, being future-proof is no longer a ‘nice to have’. It’s a must have. By Scott Russell, Customer Success at SAP Dec 06, 2023 4 mins IT Leadership feature 6 generative AI hazards IT leaders should avoid The opportunities to use generative AI will greatly vary for each organization, but the ways it can go wrong are turning out to be fairly universal. By Mary Branscombe Dec 06, 2023 11 mins CIO Application Performance Management Generative AI interview Delivering value through IT at Village Roadshow During a recent CIO Leadership Live session, Michael Fagan, chief transformation officer of Australian cinema and theme park company Village Roadshow, spoke with CIO’s editor in chief for APAC Cathy O'Sullivan about delivering value, colla By CIO staff Dec 06, 2023 8 mins CIO CIO Leadership Live Change Management Podcasts Videos Resources Events SUBSCRIBE TO OUR NEWSLETTER From our editors straight to your inbox Get started by entering your email address below. Please enter a valid email address Subscribe