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Do you know that every day online ticket booking stops for some time. This is done to maintain the servers of the ticket booking system so that they do not crash.
New Delhi. Do you know that train tickets cannot be booked 24 hours? For a very short time during the day, there comes a moment when all the servers are closed and ticket booking comes to a halt. As soon as this time passes, the ticket can be booked again. The reason behind why this happens is very interesting. If this does not happen then it is possible that the entire ticket booking system may come to a standstill.
Today we will tell you at what time of the day ticket booking is stopped. Every night from 11:45 pm to 12:30 am, online ticket booking is stopped across India for a total of 45 minutes. During this period, neither new tickets are booked, nor cancellations take place, nor seats are allotted. This means that the backend servers of IRCTC, PRS system and Railways go into completely offline mode at this time. As soon as 12:30 pm clocks in, the ticketing system restarts and you can make all types of bookings from the next morning.
Why does it take a break?
Now the question is why does the Railways have to take this break every day. Actually, Indian Railways is included in the world’s largest ticketing network. More than 20 lakh tickets are booked daily online only and crores of queries are registered on the PRS server. With such a heavy load the system is refreshed and synced once daily. During this break, the servers clear their memory, the seat matrix is reset for the next day’s booking, ticket statuses are updated and all waiting list and availability data is realigned.
During this time, new seats for trains opening the next day are loaded into the system. For example, bookings for trains that open after 120 days are added to the system on the same night. This is the reason that after 12:30 pm, the complete data of waiting or availability suddenly changes in many popular trains. Apart from this, Railways also considers this downtime necessary for security reasons because updating the system while live booking is running would be risky.
silent period
According to Railways, this 45-minute “silent period” keeps the entire network stable. With millions of people booking tickets simultaneously, high traffic windows like Tatkal Booking open daily and PRS servers are constantly accessed. In such a situation, it is impossible to run the system without stopping it. Almost all the major ticketing and transport networks in the world restart their servers daily or at regular intervals to ensure that there is no error or data mismatch. So remember, stopping ticket booking from 11:45 to 12:30 pm is not due to any problem but is a necessary process to run this big and complex system smoothly. As soon as this time passes, ticket booking becomes normal again and the entire network starts working with new energy in the morning.
