In Reference to /blog/post/576329
To all those people who think that IRCTC is a government endeavour,, please note that IRCTC is a website developed and managed by Tata Consultancy Services- TCS.
The Servers are kept in Gurgaon and happen to hit Indian Railway Database servers. The website handles strenous traffic during tatkaal hours and works well on most days. The problem arises during festival rush.
The...
more... website is merely a gateway to book tickets. The real problem arises out of INdian Railway Database Servers. Whole of India is requesting availibilty data from those servers at the same time. Millions and Trillions of queries are running on those servers. They are bound to refuse connections from IRCTC or any other website like indianrailway.gov.in
And once IRCTC is not able to connect to those servers - It displays all sorts of errors -'Service Not Available', 'Connection Timed out', 'Page Not available'.
Even in non-tatkal hours stress is too much.
IRCTC performs well given that it is dependant on other servers.
Its like owning a huge hotel, but not able to provide good services, coz the food comes from a different vendor.
IRCTC uses highly advanced connection pooling mechanisms to maintain user connectvity. But once the user logs in, the problem starts from thereafter. IRCTC servers give way to Indian railway servers.
Indian railway pays Rs. 10 per sleeper ticket as a service charge to IRCTC.
IRCTC is constantly being managed round the clock by tireless architects and s/w professionals of TCS.