Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC), the ticket booking arm of Indian Railways, 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, for the first time in history on September 7, a total of 20,06,353 (more than 20.06 lakh) tickets were booked in a single day. 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. 1.74 crore logins and peak load at 8 am: How did the system bear the pressure? 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: Highest booking in 15 minutes: The largest share of the total traffic for the day is recorded between 8:00 am and 8:15 am. Up to 1.74 crore daily logins: 1.33 crore to 1.74 crore users logged into the system daily during the reservation window. Successful Transaction Flow: 8.43% to 14.14% of the day's bookings were completed in the first hour alone (8:00 AM to 9:00 AM), while more than 85% of the tickets were booked smoothly in the remaining hours of the day. How was such huge traffic handled? 4 major technological changes that changed the picture Railway authorities and Center for Railway Information Systems (CRIS) have made several major upgrades on the backend to handle this heavy load: 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. 2. Anti-bot technology blocks 65% of brokers' bots: The biggest hurdle in ticket booking is unauthorized bot traffic (Scripts/Bots), which used to 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. 3. Strict action on 3.04 crore fake user IDs: Railway Vigilance launched a strict campaign to reduce the load on the system and for 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. 4. Aadhaar authentication and 10-minute ban on 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. New Glassmorphism UI (User Interface) launched on 15th July This technical strength was supported by the new user interface (UI) of IRCTC, the beta version of which was introduced on 15th July. 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.
