Hello there! At Ipsator, we’re driven by a profound passion: to build technology that not only works flawlessly but also feels effortless for every single user, no matter where they are or how they’re connected. Today, we’re thrilled to share a story that truly embodies this spirit – our work with IRCTC eCatering, ensuring a smooth digital experience for millions of travelers, often navigating the unpredictable world of train connectivity.
Picture this: you’re on a train, zipping through landscapes, your mobile network playing hide-and-seek, switching towers, and dropping packets. Yet, hunger calls. This is the reality for countless IRCTC eCatering users. For them, performance isn’t a luxury; it’s a lifeline to a needed service. Recognizing this, our mission became crystal clear: to deliver an experience so optimized that even on a flaky connection, ordering a meal would be swift and stress-free.
The Challenge: Bridging Connectivity Gaps for Hungry Travelers
Serving millions is one thing; serving millions on the move, often with low bandwidth even on 4G or 5G, is another stratosphere of challenge. The typical hurdles of asset delivery were magnified:
- The Unstable Network: Constant switching between network towers meant connections could be frustratingly inconsistent, leading to packet drops and interrupted downloads.
- Bandwidth Blues: Even when connected, actual speeds could be a fraction of what’s advertised, turning every kilobyte into precious cargo.
- Visual Inconsistencies & Slow Loads: Varied image qualities and large file sizes, combined with slow server responses, could mean long waits or broken visuals – deeply frustrating when you’re trying to quickly pick a meal.
- The Core Vitals Impact: All this directly impacted Time-to-First-Byte (TTFB) and First Contentful Paint (FCP). For a user on a train, seconds can feel like minutes.
These weren’t just technical bullet points; they were real barriers for users. Our goal was to dismantle them, ensuring the platform felt fast and responsive, especially for those on the most challenging connections.
Our Vision: Ultra-Optimized Delivery for Every Passenger
We believe in engineering with empathy. Our multi-domain asset delivery strategy, turbocharged by Cloudflare, was conceived from the ground up with the train traveler in mind. We asked: how can we make every asset incredibly small and every server response lightning fast from the edge, serving only what is absolutely needed?
Crafting a Visual Feast, Light as Air: The Image CDN
Images are key to choosing a meal, but they can also be the heaviest assets. Our Image CDN was designed for extreme efficiency, especially for the Indian market:
- WebP by Default, AVIF for the Edge-Seekers: Recognizing that over 99% of browsers in India seamlessly support WebP, we adopted it as our primary image delivery format. This offers fantastic compression and quality, significantly reducing data usage. For our clients and users with the latest browsers seeking even greater optimization, we also provide full AVIF support – simply changing
.webp to .avif in the image path unlocks further file size reductions.
- Transformation on the fly: Since our web and app renders on multiple screen width, we didn’t want to generate all possible transformations for sizes and format, this would have exploded our storage. We needed an innovative solution to transform images on the fly as needed. Now, we are added a transformation layer between CDN and image source. Once an image is transformed, it is cached by Cloudflare to minimise lookups.
- Smart Resizing & Adaptive Quality: Delivering images precisely sized for the user’s device and intelligently reducing image quality just enough on very low bandwidth ensures something loads quickly rather than nothing at all.
- Lazy Loading & LQIP: Only loading images as they scroll into view, and showing low-quality placeholders instantly, made the app feel responsive even before full images rendered. Every byte saved was a win for the user.
The Silent Workhorses, Lean and Fast: The Static CDN
JavaScript, CSS, fonts – the application’s skeleton – needed to be virtually invisible in terms of load time. Our Static CDN ensured:
- Aggressive Edge Caching: With
cache-control: public, max-age=31536000, immutable, these tiny files are fetched once from a nearby Cloudflare edge server and rarely again. This is vital when re-downloading due to a dropped connection is painful.
- Advanced Compression: Beyond Brotli/gzip, we leverage Cloudflare’s support for Zstandard (zstd) content encoding where applicable. Zstd offers even better compression ratios, further shrinking file sizes for the smallest possible payload over those precious mobile connections.
- Near-Perfect Edge Hits (Over 99%): This meant users almost always got these critical files from a server geographically close to them, minimizing latency, even as they moved.
Dynamic & Secure, Yet Agile: The Dynamic Asset CDN
Even dynamic content like PDF receipts needs to be mindful of the user’s connection. We focused on:
- Optimized Generation & Path-Based Caching: Ensuring PDFs were as small as possible and cached intelligently.
stale-while-revalidate: A user on a shaky connection gets the cached version instantly while Cloudflare fetches an update in the background if needed. This prioritizes immediate access.- Secure Downloads: Signed URLs ensure sensitive documents are protected, without adding cumbersome overhead.
Cloudflare: Bringing the Content Closer, Faster, Leaner
Cloudflare’s global edge network was instrumental. By caching assets closer to our users – no matter which cell tower they were connected to – we dramatically reduced response times. Their robust platform, including cutting-edge features like Zstandard compression support, allowed us to implement these fine-grained optimizations, making our vision of serving incredibly light and quick assets a reality for users on the go.
The numbers speak volumes, especially when you consider what they mean for someone on a train:
- 🕒 75th Percentile Image Load Time: Slashed from a potential 15–50 seconds (an eternity on a bad connection) to a much more manageable 2.5–5.75 seconds.
- ⚡ Median Load Time: Dropped from 4.5–18.5 seconds to 0.8–1.7 seconds – making the app feel instantly responsive.
- 📉 Static Asset Origin Fetch Rate: Reduced to < 0.5%, meaning less strain on origin and faster delivery from the edge.
- 🌐 Bandwidth Served via Cloudflare: Efficiently handling ~5 TB/day, with a keen focus on minimizing every byte transferred thanks to smart format choices and compression.
- 💸 Significant Cost Savings: Over $15,000/month (₹14L+), proving that exceptional user experience and efficiency can go hand-in-hand.
For a traveler, this means less waiting, less data consumed, and a far more pleasant interaction, even when the network is doing its worst.
Our Journey, Your Advantage: Engineering for Everyone
This endeavor with IRCTC eCatering deepened our conviction in several key principles:
- Design for the Edges: Optimizing for users on the most challenging connections, leveraging locally prevalent browser capabilities (like WebP in India), ensures a better experience for all.
- Every Byte Counts: A relentless focus on asset size – through format selection (WebP/AVIF), responsive sizing, and advanced compression (Zstd) – is paramount for mobile-first users.
- Edge Intelligence is Key: Leveraging CDNs effectively is critical for low latency and resilience against flaky networks.
- Empathy Drives Innovation: Understanding the user’s context (like being on a train) sparks the most impactful solutions.
Let’s Build the Future, Together – Seamlessly
At Ipsator, we see challenges like flaky train networks not as roadblocks, but as invitations to innovate. Enhancing the IRCTC eCatering platform to be robust and speedy, even under difficult conditions, by making smart, context-aware technology choices, is a testament to our commitment to creating technology that truly serves people.
The outcome is more than just a faster app; it’s about providing a reliable service that users can count on, making their journeys a little bit smoother.
If you’re passionate about building digital experiences that stand up to real-world challenges and prioritize every user, we’d love to connect. Let’s explore how we can bring this same dedication and expertise to your vision.
