look news india
Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRTC), the ticket booking arm of Indian RailwaysIRCTC) has achieved a new milestone in the history of digital ticketing. Heavy traffic was seen on the official website and mobile app of IRCTC during the Advance Reservation Period (ARP) booking which started 120 days in advance for the upcoming festive season (Diwali and Chhath Puja). According to Railways, on September 7, for the first time in history, a total of 20,06,353 (more than 20.06 lakh) tickets booked were done.
This record did not stop here, but on the next day i.e. 8th September, the pressure on the system continued and successful booking of 19,50,699 tickets was recorded. At present, about 89 percent of the total reserved tickets of Indian Railways have been booked online. The most surprising thing was that despite crores of people logging in simultaneously, neither the website crashed nor there was any long delay on the payment gateway as before.
According to data released by the Railways, the traffic on the system is at its peak at 8:00 am when the advance booking window for AC and non-AC classes opens:
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Highest booking in 15 minutes: The largest portion of the day’s total traffic is recorded between 8:00 am and 8:15 am.
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Daily logins up to 1.74 crore: During the reservation window, 1.33 crore to 1.74 crore users logged into the system every day.
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Successful Transaction Flow: Only 8.43% to 14.14% of the day’s bookings were completed in the first hour (8:00 AM to 9:00 AM), while more than 85% of the tickets were booked smoothly in the remaining hours of the day.
Railway authorities and Center for Railway Information Systems (CRIS) have made several major upgrades on the backend to handle this heavy load:
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1. Server refresh of NGeT infrastructure (doubled capacity):
IRCTC has completely upgraded its Next-Generation e-Ticketing (NGeT) server architecture. By removing the old servers, state-of-the-art high-speed servers were installed, due to which the overall processing capacity of the system doubled than before. Through software optimization, the response time of database queries came down to milliseconds.
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2. Anti-bot technology blocks 65% of brokers’ bots:
The biggest hurdle in ticket booking is unauthorized bot traffic (Scripts/Bots), which block thousands of seats in seconds. IRCTC deployed ‘Anti-Bot’ and Content Delivery Network (CDN) in collaboration with top tech partners. This resulted in a massive 55% to 65% drop in malicious bot traffic and real ordinary passengers got immediate access to the ticketing window.
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3. Strict action on 3.04 crore fake user IDs:
Railway Vigilance launched a tough campaign to reduce the load on the system and ensure fair booking. Under this, 3.04 crore suspicious user IDs were deactivated forever, while 6.33 crore IDs were put under the purview of revalidation. Apart from this, more than 16,000 suspicious email domains were completely blocked.
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4. 10 minute restriction on Aadhaar authentication and agents:
There is a complete ban on booking through Authorized Ticketing Agents (YTSK, RTSA etc.) in the first 10 minutes from 8:00 am to 8:10 am. Also, only Aadhaar-authenticated genuine users were allowed to book tickets during the opening window, thereby eliminating fake traffic on the server.
This technical strength was supported by the new user interface (UI) of IRCTC, the beta version of which was introduced on July 15. This new interface, based on modern Glassmorphism design, shows sleeper, third AC and second AC seat availability simultaneously on a single screen. Due to this, passengers do not have to refresh the page again and again for different classes, due to which the load on the server is reduced manifold. Due to these coordinated efforts, Indian Railways established this new record of technical stability.