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The load on PRS is very high between 8 AM to 9 AM. This is because the general quota opens for trains leaving after 90 days and the Tatkal quota opens for trains leaving after 2 days. This means a huge queue for passengers at reservation counters, and on the internet, passengers for both the requirements login at the same time, from more than one sessions, and keep on giving continuous requests to the server. At the same time, they ask 2 more ppl to try to book tickets, and send someone to the counter. Eventually, they end up increasing the load on server atleast 4-5 times, and sometimes booking 2-3 tickets for the same journey. Then they keep the best...
more... and cancel the rest. Until all this happens, users get irritated by "Page Not Found", "Service Unavailable", "Failed Transaction" kind of issues as well.
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I have a solution to distribute the load.
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Let the Tatkal quota open at 8 AM 2 days in advance of the train date, but keep the opening time of general quota at 10 AM (only for opening day) 90 days in advance of the train date. In this way, both type of passengers will not hit the PRS at the same time, and internet users can get more availability and reliability of server.
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A more restrictive implementation would be that 8 AM to 9 AM timeslot should be exclusively reserved only for Tatkal ticket bookings in IRCTC. For all other bookings, users should try before 8 AM or after 9 AM. Again this way, the load on server will be distributed. (This also means that general quotas will open only at 9 AM 90 days in advance of the train date).
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Any suggestions or issues foreseen in this implementation?