Browsing IRCTC website a breeze

It may not have been simple good fortune that you were able to get a ticket within the first hour itself. You may owe a debt of gratitude to NGeT (new generation e-ticketing system) plus IRCTC Lite, a renewed version of the website, that IRCTC had launched to offset network jams during tatkal hours.

 

NGeT has enhanced the IRCTC’s booking capacity to 7,200 tickets per minute, conferring good luck on many of the 1,20,000 users who try booking e-tickets concurrently every minute.

 

If that little stat is startling, sample this. At least one lakh people get their tickets booked between 10am and 11am, the first hour of the tatkal time (10 am to noon) after the NGeT launch. Compare that stat with the earlier 2,000 tickets per minute and 40,000 concurrent users in the old system and it shows IRCTC has made great strides in the last one year. However, progress did not come cheap. 

 

A whopping Rs100 crore had been spent on upgrading the infrastructure, particularly the software, server and hardware to augment IRCTC’s booking capacity, to spare the 2.5 crore registered IRCTC users from waiting less online to get their e-tickets booked.

 

A senior IRCTC official placed in Delhi revealed to DC that the NGET, which supports 7,200 bookings per minute would last for another four years, following which, they would go for further upgrade.

 

Pointing out that the maximum traffic was during the first hour of the tatkal hour, the IRCTC bureaucrat said; “We realised that opening of the home page consumed maximum time. So we just eliminated banners, ads and other features that slowed down the opening, which is the new IRCTC Lite version.” IRCTC has a centralised data center in New Delhi from where it manages every transaction made worldwide on its website.