How to improve IRCTC

www.irctc.co.in is the only available option for people to book train tickets online in India. Even though there are other good websites like cleartrip.com, they are not allowed to book tickets until 12 noon.
The www.irctc.co.in website is poorly engineered and can’t handle the load it recieves, esp. around 10:00AM when the tatkal tickets start. The sites stops responsding in the middle of ticket booking and it dones’t allow the user to press browser back button and retry.

The numbers

Lets try to see how many requests www.irctc.co.in gets per second.
There are about 5000 trains in India. Assuming 20 coaches per train and 100 seats per coach, it is 10 million people travelling per day. Assuming all of them are booking tickets online, there are about 10M reservations/day or 115 reservations/second. These numbers are on the higher side and the actual numbers will be far less than this.
Assuming 4 page views per reservation, it is about 500 requests/second.

How to improve irctc.co.in

Here are my suggestions to improve the performance and stability of irctc website without modifying too much of the existing setup.

1. Serve static resources using a different webserver

It takes very very long time to load even the static resources like images, css and javascript. They are not main part of the app and can be moved out to a new webserver.
It’ll also be helpful to make the homepage a static resource and let it be served like other static resources.
I suggest using Nginx. Nginx is light weight webserver and it is very efficient in serving static files.

2. Make searching for trains independent of ticket booking

Booking the ticket is very small part of the whole process. Most of the time is spent in finding which train to take. This can be handled completely independently. The information about trains and stations is small enough to keep in memory completely.
Since this data is not very big, most of this can be packed into javascript and station autocomplete and searching for trains can be completely implemented in Javascript. That will reduce the load on the server substantially.

3. Cache the availability info in memory

Cache the seat availability info in memory.
The seat availability information changes so fast that it is fine to show slightly stale info. By the time, the user fills in the passenger details, the availabilty will change anyway.
To make sure the availability info is not too stale, run a background job to update it frequenty or update it whenever a ticket is booked.
This will make sure that searching for trains and their availability will not hit the reservation system.