Charged particle reconstruction in the presence of many simultaneous proton–proton ($$p {} p $$ p p ) collisions in the LHC is a challenging task for the ATLAS experiment’s reconstruction software due to the combinatorial complexity. This paper describes the major changes made to adapt the software to reconstruct high-activity collisions with an average of 50 or more simultaneous $$p {} p $$ p p interactions per bunch crossing (pile-up) promptly using the available computing resources. The performance of the key components of the track reconstruction chain and its dependence on pile-up are evaluated, and the improvement achieved compared to the previous software version is quantified. For events with an average of $$60~p {} p $$ 60 p p collisions per bunch crossing, the updated track reconstruction is twice as fast as the previous version, without significant reduction in reconstruction efficiency and while reducing the rate of combinatorial fake tracks by more than a factor two.