Real-time maps showing the “health” of the Internet, including its speed, traffic numbers and the rate of attacks, are now freely available to the public from Akamai, which operates a distributed computing platform that handles much of the world’s Web traffic.

If you logged on Thursday at 2:30 p.m. EST, you would have found that Venezuela was the most frequent target of online attacks, the United Kingdom accounted for more data requests than any U.S. state, and that Atlanta had the slowest Internet connection in the world. Only 15 minutes later, Los Angeles took over the title of slowest city on the Web.

In addition to the free publicity Akamai gets by making this data public, the vendor wants to show people that the Internet “is actually far more complicated and in many ways more problematic than people really realize,” says Robert Blumofe, vice president of Akamai networks and operations.

Click to see: See samples of Akamai’s Internet health maps, which display real-time attack traffic by state, province and country; the speed of Web connections and downloads in an interface with a global map showing the 10 worst performing cities at any given time; and traffic numbers showing the amount of data being requested and delivered by geographic region.

Akamai’s distributed computing platform accelerates online content and applications for its customers. The vendor says it has deployed more than 25,000 servers in more than 750 cities so content providers can “bypass the inherent bottlenecks that exist as part of the Internet’s infrastructure.” At some times, 20% of the world’s Web traffic is handled by Akamai’s system, the vendor says.

Because traffic, speed and attack rates change frequently, Akamai needs constant updates to route traffic in the most efficient manner.

“We move things around and change the paths we use on the Internet literally second by second,” Blumofe says. “Almost none of this data is being collected just for the sheer joy or academic purposes. Pretty much every piece of data is there for a reason, because it informs our system and makes our traffic management work better.”

Akamai’s real-time Internet monitoring data became available to the public for the first time last month. The data depicts only the Web traffic processed by Akamai, not traffic for the entire Internet.

A Web surfer who logged onto Akamai’s site around 2:30 p.m. EST Thursday would have found that the worldwide rate of online attacks was 20% below normal. With 455 attacks in 24 hours, Venezuela was the most victimized region. California led the United States with 41 attacks over 24 hours. Measurements are based primarily on Trojans and worms that randomly scan IP addresses to look for new computers to infect.