Tatkal Ticket Booking: The Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) is making a major change to online ticket booking. These changes will impact online and Tatkal booking users, who often face problems due to slow websites.
Ticket booking infrastructure will be upgraded
According to media reports, IRCTC is preparing to upgrade the infrastructure supporting its Next Generation E-Ticketing (NGET) platform. This upgrade will include improvements to servers, storage, networks, and software. The goal of this upgrade is to increase ticket booking through IRCTC's website.
According to IRCTC, the website currently books 37,000 tickets per minute, with a target to increase this to 100,000 bookings per minute. The corporation has also reportedly invested approximately Rs 150 crore in modernising its passenger reservation system infrastructure.
Booking Won’t Be Affected If Server Fails
It's common for the IRCTC website and app to experience problems or crash due to the high volume of bookings during the festive season. However, to address this issue, the IRCTC is now working on an "Active-Active Disaster Recovery" system.
Under this new technology, two separate operational setups will operate simultaneously. If one server or system experiences a technical failure, the other system will immediately take over all traffic. This will prevent passengers from having to disconnect during booking, and ticket booking will continue uninterrupted. Secunderabad is reportedly being selected as the primary location for this emergency recovery facility.