Feb 22, 2002 : Skating Scandal Slows Olympic Web Sites

📅 February 22, 2002 - Keynote (keynote.com) has updated its report on theperformance of the official Olympics Web sites, near the end of the Games.

On Tuesday, Feb. 12, the performance of the Web site of the InternationalOlympics Committee (olympic.org) slowed, coinciding with the skating scandalthat started the night before with the pairs figure skating finals. Also,the site for the U.S. Olympic Committee (USOC), at usoc.org, experiencedperformance and availability problems from Feb. 16-18, becoming largelyunavailable between 7-8:00am PST on Feb. 18. These sites exhibitedperformance behavior indicating that they were affected by traffic load.
Over the first weekend of the Games (Feb.9-10), the performance of the IOC'ssite averaged 5.49 seconds with 99.33% availability for users around theworld. The morning of Feb. 12 the site continued that average, with 5.3second performance and 100% availability from 5:00-6:00am PST. But from6:00-7:00am performance slowed suddenly to 17.25 seconds and continued toslow to 33.8 seconds by noon. Availability declined to 86.7% by 9:00am, andstayed low until noon. The site started to improve after noontime, returningto better than average performance of 3.6 seconds with 100% availability by5:00pm.
The other Olympics sites measured by Keynote remained normal during thistime: the USOC site in the 4-5 sec range; the others at about 1-1.5 secs andall at 100% availability or close to it. The additional sites measured arethe official sites of the 2002 Games at SaltLake2002.com and Olympics.com,as well as the online tickets site at tickets.com/olympics/initial.html.
The USOC site at usoc.org experienced performance and availability problemsfrom the evening of Saturday, Feb. 16 into the morning of Tuesday, Feb. 18,becoming largely unavailable between 7:00-8:00am on the 18th. (This timeperiod coincides with the U.S. and Russia in ice hockey the evening of 2/16,as well as the short track wipeout involving Apolo Ohno; and on Feb. 17, thebeginning of ice dancing, and more hockey.)
The USOC site became largely unavailable (dropping to 7%) between 7-8:00amon Monday. The performance decline started the evening of Feb. 16 whenavailability dropped to 41.8% between 9-10:00pm PST with a performanceaverage of 11.0 seconds. In the hour earlier, from 8-9:00pm, availabilityhad been 100% with performance of 4.3 seconds. Availability improved to95.6% between 10-11:00pm, but performance continued to degrade to 12seconds. Performance continued to stay lower than normal throughout the dayon the 17th, ranging from 7.5 to 11.4 seconds, although availability stayedhigh, at 100% or close to it. On the 18th, performance continued at aslightly escalated level of 7-8 seconds, then slowed suddenly to 30.0seconds between 4-5:00am, although availability remained high. Between7-8:00am the site became largely unavailable. It returned to normalperformance and availability in the following hour, from 8-9:00am.
Typically, a site under load has a plan to add resources to accommodate theload and maintain or return to good performance, which is consistent withthe performance improvement we see on this site after 8:00am.
Other sites measured by Keynote during this time: The IOC site was alsohigher than normal during this time, hitting 7.64 seconds 9-10:00pm on the16th, then staying at 5-6 seconds throughout the 17th; availability washigh, at 100% or close. The other sites remained fairly normal.