IRCTC raises booking capacity to over 14,000 tickets per minute from the existing 7,200

The morning hour scramble for booking Tatkal tickets will now considerably ease as IRCTC has upgraded its website by introducing two high-capacity servers that have doubled peak-time efficiency.

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, much to the relief of passengers jostling for tatkal reservation which faces heavy rush in its first 15 minutes since10 am when the service opens every day.

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 tatkal reservations on all Indian trains total roughly 4,00,000 tickets (around 2.5 lakh PNRs). Of these, 50,000 tickets are slotted ‘critical’, given their high demand owing to various reasons during a given season.

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.