How Royal Wedding Impacted Web Performance

I read an article yesterday predicting that the Royal Wedding was going to be a big stress test to the Internet. To observe the impact of the Royal Wedding on the Internet, I decided to monitor some of the popular websites that provided coverage for the Royal Wedding: Yahoo,  CNN, Youtube, the Official Site, Facebook,  Twitter,  BBC,  MSNBC & the Telegraph

We monitored the web performance of each website from all of our global agents, using Internet Explorer 8 as a browser. The goal was not to compare the performance of the sites, but to see how well each website handled the traffic during the ceremony.

Based on the collected data BBC and Yahoo experienced slow performance and had availability issues. Youtube and Facebook also experienced slowness later in the day starting around 6 am ET, when the US East Coast woke up.

News Outlet Category:

Social Media Category:

Other Sites:

BBC Scatterplot view:

Yahoo Scatterplot view:

We also monitored the performance of the major CDNs (Edgecast, Cotendo, Akamai, Limelight, CDnetworks…) but the data did not reflect any major impact on their performance.

URls monitored:

• BBC: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-11767495
• CNN: http://edition.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2011/royal.wedding/live/
• MSNBC: http://windsorknot.today.com/
• Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=101946883225381
• Twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/ClarenceHouse
• Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/user/TheRoyalChannel
• Official Site: http://www.officialroyalwedding2011.org/
• Telegraph: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/royal-wedding/
• Yahoo: http://royalwedding.yahoo.com/

Definitions:

• Response Time: The time it takes from the request being issued by the browser, to the Last Byte received from the server for the primary URL.
• Web Page Response Time: The time it takes from the request being issued, to receiving the Last Byte of the final element on the page. It reflects the impact of all the requests in the webpage.
• Wait Time: The time from the connection to the server established and the request sent, to the First Byte of response from the server. It reflects the performance of the server in processing the request.

Mehdi – Catchpoint