Rush of Traffic Sacks Fiesta Bowl Web Site

Huntsville, Alabama - (January 5, 1999) - The heavy hits weren't just in the Fiesta Bowl during Monday night's College Football Championship game. A corresponding rush of traffic also sacked ABC's Enhanced TV web cast, effectively shutting down the web site during the game.

ABC, ESPN and Infoseek's Go Network were featuring the Enhanced TV web site as part of a simulcast with ABC Sports coverage of the bowl game. The site was designed to supplement the information available to those watching the TV broadcast. Site visitors were offered access to a 'push' channel offering real time game statistics, player profiles, and a sports ticker.

Unfortunately the volume of traffic caused ABC to turn users away early in the game. "As soon as they allowed visitors to log in, the site was saturated with traffic," said Tom Dahm, the Chief Technical Officer for NetMechanic.com. Dahm was monitoring the Enhanced TV site using NetMechanic's Server Check Pro (http://www.netmechanic.com) monitoring service. The service is designed as a warning system to alert webmasters when their site is down.

NetMechanic's Server Check Pro service monitors servers by downloading a file from the server at 15-minute intervals, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. During each download, the service tracks the amount of time required to fetch the page, setting off an alarm if too much time elapses or the page is incomplete. The service then alerts the webmaster via pager or email. NetMechanic monitors web sites from two geographically separated servers located in Huntsville, Alabama, and Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

"Both of our monitoring stations exhibited that the ABC site was in trouble early on," said Dahm. "The volume of traffic was so high, they were refusing connections from new visitors even before kickoff." Users were required to login through a registration server, which also turned away site browsers. By the end of the first quarter of play, ABC had posted a message on the site asking users to try accessing again later because their system had reached full capacity.

By half time, the registration server was responding quickly to new requests, yet new visitors were still prevented from logging into the system. Dahm speculated that this measure was taken to prevent additional users from overloading the backend servers. "The ABC site maximized its user capacity, and allowing more visitors might have crashed the whole system. Given the situation, that was probably a smart move," Dahm said.

Asked what lesson can be learned from this performance, "Web server problems can happen even to the big guys." Dahm elaborated that he has seen similar performance problems while monitoring other event sites, including superbowl.com and oscar.com. "The group that created the Enhanced TV site has A+ credentials as one of the finest organizations on the Web. But the technical challenges for a high profile site like this make it almost impossible to overestimate the enormous amount of traffic forthcoming."

NetMechanic Server Check Pro is a product of Monte Sano Software, LLC, and is available through http://www.netmechanic.com. ABC's Enhanced TV web site is located at http://etv.go.com.

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