Tirupati: Within minutes after the Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanams (TTD) released the September month’s quota of `300 special entry darshan tickets online on Tuesday morning, the official websites of TTD were reportedly frozen for a while and continued at a slow page-loading speed till the evening.
This not only caused inconvenience to thousands of devotees, who were eagerly waiting to book their darshan tickets, but also irked the top brass of the TTD, who expressed their displeasure over the way the TTD’s official websites www.tirumala.org and www.tirupatibalaji.ap.gov.in, froze and ran at a slow speed.
Sources said the server had registered nearly 1.10 lakh concurrent hits against its normal capacity of 30,000-40,000 simultaneous customer requests when the online quota of darshan tickets was released on Tuesday morning. Though the servers were restored within no time after it was frozen, the devotees were subjected to disappointment with their computers displaying a message that the online quota was full.
J. Ramya, a devotee from Nagari, tried to book special entry darshan tickets for her family members. Though she kept on refreshing the TTD website for almost two hours, she was not able to book darshan tickets as the website froze several times. When she opened the website in the evening, she was disappointed to see her screen displaying the message – “quota is full”.
“It is really unfortunate that the TTD is not able to handle a higher queue on their websites. Due to Covid, the TTD has been releasing only a limited number of tickets. Lakhs of devotees, including myself, have been impatiently waiting to book darshan tickets. Keeping this in view, the TTD should have readied their servers in a way to handle a higher number of concurrent users,” she said.
Meanwhile, when a similar freeze occurred during the release of last month’s quota of darshan tickets, TTD EO Dr K.S. Jawahar Reddy reviewed the issue and directed the officials concerned and the TTD’s technology partner TCS to upgrade the servers to handle the higher volume of simultaneous users. Subsequently, the TTD upgraded its servers and experts from the TCS were also deployed to rectify the glitches.
When contacted, TTD’s IT wing chief P.V. Sesha Reddy maintained that the websites did not crash on Tuesday morning, but it was slowed down for a while. He claimed that the websites registered over 1.10 lakh concurrent hits on Tuesday morning.
“The TTD websites didn’t crash on Tuesday, they went slow and page loading took time when a higher volume of concurrent users logged in. However, the issue was rectified immediately and the ticket booking went off smoothly and uninterruptedly,” he said.
