Tuesday, November 02, 2004

Internet Load during Election Day

Please refresh my main page(http://selfaudit.blogspot.com) for current poll results & newer posts. Also, send me your stories of Internet Load on Nov 2, 2004

Election Day 2004
Overall, the Internet held up well to the onslaught of people from all over the world and the incessant blogging. Various Internet sites were slow or appeared to be down today. Phenomenal turnout in the elections - the New Democracy (new voters) movement working - a tidal wave.

Nice election results map at Yahoo

There were reports of many popular sites being inaccessible today sporadically. Government sites were especially slow.Campaign sites were hit hard. Sites with significant mirrors held up better - lesson for next time.

Response times are slightly improving around the Net(3 PM), and then falling again(4 PM), and improving overall now - worsening now (8:30 PM CST) - people are reporting difficulty with many sites right now(8 PM CST) in chat rooms, etc.

Traffic spiked through the morning and then again in the night.

Note: I have replaced the active graphs with static gifs taken earlier today to capture Internet Load on November 2,2004

This is the Response Time Graph for Nov 2,2004 - a significant spike indicating delays:
Static Image of Response Time on North America Internet Routers - source InternetTrafficReport.com on 11/02/2004


This is the Traffic Load Graph for Nov 2,2004

Static image of North America Internet Traffic Load on 11/02/2004 - source InternetTrafficReport.com on 11/02/2004



For reference, Current Internet traffic & response time from Internet Traffic Report:

traffic index

resp time

Asia had pretty bad internet load all day - maybe due to tracert issues with this site

Electoral-vote.com, a leading source of data on the American presidential race, reports having been hit by distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks yesterday and today, which is election day in the U.S.

The site, which tracks state-by-state polling data to project the outcome of the presidential race, is operated by academic Andrew Tanenbaum, based in the Netherlands, the author of the Minix microkernel. It was referenced on slashdot.org yesterday (11/1) as well, revealing that Andrew Tanenbaum was the site master

Al-Jazeera's English-language web site was offline for more than five hours last night(11/1), two days after the network broadcast videotape of Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

aljazeera outage

Instapundit was down today

TRAFFIC PROBLEMS: It's really high, and it's causing intermittent outages. The swell folks at Hosting Matters are working on it. If the site goes down completely, I'll post on the backup site.


Again at 7 PM CST,Instapundit noted

YOU ARE LUCKY TO BE READING THIS. And I’m lucky to post it. 601am says we’re under denial-of-service attack.

UPDATE: Then again, Hosting Matters says it's a bandwidth problem that should settle down shortly.


Problems on left and right.TalkingPointsMemo.com was down for a while. Only DrudgeReport has been up all day - guess even the backbones know who to feed

Well, if our servers had to go down, I’m at least glad it could happen today, right? Jeez, what friggin’ nightmare. As you may have noticed TPM was offline from about 1:45 PM until just before 5 PM. Right about exactly the time I got hold of the first good exit poll numbers everything started to go haywire. It’s still not completely clear what happened. But we seem to have it under control.


A good visual map of animated traffic on the Internet is at the Abilene NOC

A 10x10 matrix of routes at Internet Pulse, shows 19-20 of them exhibiting high latency (90-120 ms)(6 PM) - now back to 4-5

Note: The list below will change continuously as it is based on live data:


6 of the 64 tracked routers are down or in 'red' status (Increasing)
  • fremont.ca.us.financialchat.com California(Fremont)

  • mail.rmail.mdsg-pacwest.com Colorado

  • gw-phx010.adpak.com Arizona (Phoenix)

  • rrcs-se-24-73-210-73.biz.rr.com Florida (Tampa)

  • exs1-1v-bkr-backbone.mecnet.net Massachusetts

  • gw1.waldenweb.com Texas

  • core-router.centramedia.net Texas (Pampa)

  • gw1.waldenweb.com Texas

  • gw.todays-tech.com Missouri



  • Avg. Response Time: 120
    Avg. Packet Loss: 5 %
    Total Routers: 65
    Network up: 92 %

    Q: What is a "traffic index?"A: The "traffic index" is a score from 0 to 100 where 0 is "slow" and 100 is "fast". It is determined by comparing the current response of a ping echo to all previous responses from the same router over the past 7 days. A score of 0 to 100 is then assigned to the current response depending on if this response is better or worse than all previous responses from that router.

    Q: What is "response time (ms)?"A: Response Time in reference to Internet traffic is how long it takes for a chunk of data to travel from point A to point B and back (round trip). A typical response time on the Internet is 200 ms, which is 200 milliseconds (thousandths of a second) = 1/5th of one second.




    Neat Simulator of the Electoral college at Harvard U (Uses frames)


    Per the simulator, currently,
    Kerry: 267
    Bush: 271





    No comments:

    Some Fine Books

    Blog Archive