| Keynote
Systems, the Internet Performance Authority, is measuring
both overall Internet and Web performance and the performance
of major U.S. Web sites during the Iraq crisis.
Overall Internet performance among major U.S. backbones
is normal at this time; it can always be viewed at
www.internethealthreport.com/ , which shows the delays
between major interconnection points on the major U.S.
backbones.
Overall Web performance for both major business sites
(the Keynote Business 40 index) and major U.S. government
sites (the Keynote Government 40 index) is also normal
at this time, with a couple of notable exceptions:
-- The U.S. Army home page, www.army.mil/ , has had
problems during the day both on Monday, March 17, and
Tuesday, March 18. These problems appear to be associated
with Web server capacity issues. The home page took
seven times longer to download during the day than
it usually does (27 seconds instead of 4 seconds) on
high-bandwidth access lines. Availability of the home
page also plunged from the normal 93% to less than
50% during business hours both March 17 and March 18.
On March 18, the home page was completely unavailable
from noon to 1pm EST, and below 25% availability between
11:00 am and 5:00 pm EST.
-- The U.S. Marine Corps home page, www.usmc.mil/ , also had problems during the day both on Monday,
March 17, and Tuesday, March 18. Unlike the situation
for the Army, these problems appear to be associated
with bandwidth issues; the "pipe" between
the U.S. Marine Corps Web server and the Internet may
be too small. Availability has not suffered; however,
download time for the home page has soared from the
usual 4.5 seconds as high as 50 seconds.
For both the Army and the Marine Corps sites, load
testing across the Internet, as is done by major Web
commercial sites before major selling seasons, could
have been used to avoid the problems that are now being
seen.
Major news sites are not showing any unusual problems
at this time.
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