| March
19, 2003 9:00 pm EST
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 few notable exceptions:
-- There is some minor performance degradation on
the U.S. Department of Defense home page, www.dod.mil/.
Between 9:00 am and 2:00 pm EST on Wednesday, March
19, performance slowed to 5 seconds to download a Web
page instead of the usual, fast one second. There was
a similar, although smaller, peak on Tuesday March
18.
-- There was some minor performance degradation for
the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) yesterday,
March 18, during peak hours; there haven't been any
problems today.
-- The U.S. Army home page, www.army.mil/ , is continuing
to have severe problems. These started on Monday, March
17, and appear to be associated with Web server capacity
issues. The Army home page typically takes 4 seconds
to download on a high-speed Internet connection. On
Wednesday during peak hours it averaged more than 80
seconds, 20 times longer than usual. Availability of
the home page also plunged from the normal 93%. Today,
Wednesday, March 19, the U.S. Army home page has remained
at or below 70% availability since 10:00 am EST.
-- The U.S. Marine Corps home page, www.usmc.mil/ , also has had problems. 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, but average download
time for the home page measured on high-speed Internet
connections has soared from the usual 4.5 seconds to
over 30 seconds.
Unlike the Army performance, which has been getting
progressively worse on each successive day, Marine
Corps performance has improved since yesterday. (On
Tuesday during peak hours, the Marine Corps home page
average download time measured on high-speed Internet
connections was approximately 50 seconds.) This improvement
appears to be because the Marine Corps is taking actions
to decrease the size of its Web page.
Some European sites are showing similar difficulties;
an example is the Government Terrorism Information
office in the U.K. ( www.homeoffice.gov.uk/terrorism/ ), which had extremely poor performance on Wednesday
during working hours when measured from the U.K. Home
page download time, which is normally under one second
when accessed from high-speed Internet connections,
jumped to over 40 seconds. Availability dropped below
70%.
In general, major news sites are not showing any unusual
problems at this time.
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 and by
major news organizations preparing for news events,
could have been used to avoid the problems that are
now being seen.
Keynote will be adding sites to measure over the next
day, looking for performance issues and other Internet
problems as the situation develops.
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