Election 2000 - Network performance status quo

[Sean Donelan <sean () donelan com>]

Large scale measurements of the Internet showed no measurable difference
in overall packet loss or reachability during the 2000 US national
elections.  Aggregate traffic measurements at NAPs and some providers'
MRTG graphs didn't show much difference from last Tuesday's.

Unscientific measurements of specific web sites (i.e. news and political
sites) did show increased latency and timeouts, which tends to indicate
the bottleneck was at the web site.  CNN and MSNBC went to a stripped down
front page; which helped their performance.  ABCnews and CBSnews appeared
to keep their full frontpage, and were very sluggish.  Yahoo News, with
the most stripped down, almost all text news page, was speedy all night
long.

Although some people throwup their hands, and say you can't control the
Internet; it does seem like many of the issues are at the point under
the control of the individual organization.

Smaller websites such as political candidate sites did have problems
loading, but they are probably going away tomorrow anyway.