High traffic volume brought Web sites to a crawl Tuesday, report says

Despite the presence of Internet backbone equipment in or underneath the World Trade Center, Internet performance was not affected by the collapse of the two buildings, according to Keynote, which measures Internet performance. However, performance was affected by the sheer number of requests to Internet news sites, as people tried to access the Web for news.

Keynote spokeswoman Mary Lindsay said the company saw an overall decline in Internet performance for users trying to access sites starting at 9 a.m., peaking at 9:15 a.m. Three news sites on Keynote's Business 40 Index, an index for Internet site performance, were unavailable between 9 a.m. and 10 a.m. yesterday, she said.

The Web sites for the New York Times, CNN and ABC News all had 0% availability at that time, Lindsay said, apparently because of the traffic overload.

After 10 a.m., availability and performance improved, Keynote said. One possible reason is that the sites began stripping out ads and reducing the size of their pages. For example, Lindsay noted that before the attacks, the normal size of the CNN.com home pages was 255K bytes. After the attacks began, CNN reduced the size of the page to 20K bytes. That, plus the likelihood of the sites adding bandwidth, servers or mirroring their sites, helped improve performance as the day went on.

In addition to the news sites being affected, Lindsay said overall Internet performance was affected following the attacks. Usually, it takes about 2.5 seconds to 3.5 seconds to access a site on the Business 40 Index (a list of 40 major business-related Web sites). On Sept. 11 at 10:15 a.m., the time to access a site went up to 12.9 seconds. On Monday, Sept. 10 at 10:15, the time to access was around 5 seconds, she said.

As far as backbone performance, Keynote said the infrastructure was not significantly affected. According to Keynote's Internet Health Report (www.internetpulse.net), which shows the performance between peering points where data is handed off, there was no significant impact.

This is in contrast to events in July, when a train wreck in a Baltimore tunnel melted key fiber-optic cables. In that case, Internet backbone performance suffered significantly.

As far as the news site performance slowdowns, Lindsay said Keynote has rarely seen this kind of performance effect. "We have never seen the performance of a group of Web sites affected by this all at once," she said.

Other data from Keynote (note, all times are Eastern Daylight Time):

• USAToday.com -- 18.2% availability between 9 and 10 a.m.
• MSNBC.com -- 22% availability between 9 and 10 a.m. Performance was around 13.99 seconds to access the site at this point.
• NewYorkTimes.com -- 43% availability between 10 a.m. and 11 a.m.
• ABCnews.com -- 5% availability between 11 a.m. and 12 p.m., but was back to normal by 1 p.m.
• FBI.gov site, normally averages about 2 to 3 seconds, went up to 40 seconds at 9:45 a.m.
• Whitehouse.gov was not affected, it's performance of 1 to 2 seconds stayed around the same.
• American Airlines' site decreased to 44% availability between 7 a.m. and 2:30 p.m.
Lindsay said Keynote would be issuing more reports on government sites over the next few days as it analyzed its data.

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