Inauguration jolts Internet

[bobd0]

I saw this article yesterday. Did a couple of searches and didn't see it here.

I guess this officially qualifies President Obama's inauguration, in modern terms, as a big deal. :)

http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2009/01/20/1753240.aspx

President Obama's inauguration sparked significant traffic jams - not only on Washington's streets but in cyberspace as well, according to Web performance monitors. They reported slowdowns at the Web sites run by the White House and the U.S. Senate as well as at several online news outlets.

The fact that the raw numbers of Web users didn't rise to the levels seen on Election Night suggests the problem wasn't the number of people who were online, but the amount of bandwidth each of those people was using.

"It's safe to say that streaming video was a significant contributor to these slowdowns," said Shawn White, director of external operations at Keynote Systems Inc. Another likely factor is the rapid rise of bandwidth-heavy sharing sites such as Flickr and YouTube, he said.

...

The Senate Web site was 60 percent slower than usual today - and 63 percent of the time, attempts to connect didn't go through at all, according to the Keynote figures. Even Keynote's Business Top 40 sites were affected. "What we saw was a sharp slowdown in performance from 11 a.m. to 1:30 p.m.," White said.

"Obviously the Internet is resilient, and it can handle these events, but it might take longer to do what you want to do," he said.

The internet. It didn't exist for three-quarters of my life. Now it's a pulse of civilization. Pretty amazing.