The 2012 London Olympics - ip-label · 2019-04-03 · Reproduction or communication of any part of this document is not allowed without express permission from ip-label. The 2012

Reproduction or communication of any part of this document is not allowed without express permission from ip-label.

The 2012 London Olympics

A web site worthy of a gold medal

By Alain Petit, Head of Benchmarks and Studies

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On Sunday 12 August 2012, as the evening drew to a close, the London Olympic Stadium was still resonating from the huge concert that was just ending. The ten thousand athletes who had come to show the world their best over the two weeks joined the eighty thousand spectators in the stands and a billion television viewers to admire the Olympic flame unfurling majestically, like an immense flower, fading gradually until the last sparkle vanished. The 30th modern-day Olympiad has now come to an

end, with global acclaim for its flawless organization. Apart from some Londonians who had to deal with the disruptions caused by this grand-scale event, people are unanimously singing the praises of this summer’s games. The 2012 London Olympics was a triumph. Naturally the most demanding spectators might remark that the show put on four years earlier by the Chinese organizers of the preceding games was more grandiose, but the context is different. London has nothing to prove to the world… and the budgets Chinese authorities earmarked for the event were on an entirely different scale than those available to the British organizers. For the games, the organizers in the UK developed a website, among whose aims were to provide practical information about the event and how to reach the various sites, to display the calendar of events and official results, to sell tickets online, and so forth. The site, available in several languages, was naturally meant to be visually attractive, with abundant, easily accessible information, and be able to handle an influx of visitors from every continent -- all the while providing consistently high performance. The primary difficulty for this type of site is to ensure its capacity to absorb considerable amounts of user traffic in a very short lapse of time without any glitches, and also without any deterioration in the performance experienced by users. Over twenty-three thousand tests conducted… To check whether the web site of the Olympic Games fulfilled its mission, we tested the behavior of the official site of the 2012 London Olympics over the course of several weeks and measured the performance from the viewpoint of internet users the world over. Using “Datametrie Single” monitors we tested the web site every 15 minutes to measure its accessibility in terms of successful access to the site and access performance. This enabled fine-grained tracking of any changes in performance.


Application performance was also assessed using “Datametrie Total” monitors. The aim of these tests was to gain insight into the performance of full page loading (i.e. including all the objects that make up the page) of the site’s homepage. It should be noted that the browser cache was emptied prior to each measurement in order to offer a view of the quality of service that the web site delivered to users who were connecting for the first time. Testing was carried out from some thirty robots spread out across the globe and located close to the backbones of the main local operators. This amounted to over 23,000 unit tests carried out over the period. When the crowds went wild for Usain Bolt…

This graph shows the performance of access to the official web site of the Olympic Games over three months. Up to the end of June, the curve shows fairly variable performance combined with a high number of incidents. It is more than likely that development, testing, and tuning were carried out during this period so as to ensure that greater levels of traffic from diverse geographical areas would not cause the site to freeze.


Performance then stabilized in the month of July, which undoubtedly corresponds to the rollout of the final version of the site. It is interesting to note the sharp drop in the time required to access the site one week before the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in London. The “valves” had probably been opened to optimize the site’s access capability with a view to accommodating a large number of users. During the games, the number of incidents increased noticeably and there were deteriorations in performance. After 12 August, the date of the closing of the 30th Olympiad, performance suddenly improved.

To zoom in on the period from 27 July to 12 August, the two weeks during which the games were held, average performances remained relatively stable throughout, even if testing showed significant peaks that indicated three- or four-fold increases in access times. Even through the correlation is not easy to establish on this graph, a drilldown to the data indicates that the most significant peaks were observed during the most popular events, like tennis, basketball, and to a greater extent, the finals of track and field events, with the showstopper being the final of the 200-metre dash won by the phenomenal Usain Bolt.


Web surfers are not all riding the same wave… The official site of the 2012 London Olympics thus remained very accessible as a whole throughout the games, even if some variations in performance were noted at times of peak traffic.

This third graph nevertheless shows that while the first information appeared speedily in the user’s browser (in about half a second), much more patience was required before all of the page data were loaded in full. Depending on the time of day, it could take 9 seconds (at night) or up to 17 seconds (late afternoon) for the entire page to display on the visitor’s screen. These performances, however, were not experienced in the same way for the entire audience. Depending on location, the surfer may have had a more comfortable ride or a much less positive one. The following graph shows average performance for the duration of the games as it was experienced by visitors at different locations.


It is unsurprising that overall the places that are geographically nearest London appear to be those where performance was the best, while the countries farthest away experienced much longer loading times. Still, a closer look shows that people connecting from Tokyo, New York, or even Sydney were better served than visitors in Paris or Madrid. In fact, for the official site of the Olympics, performance did not in fact depend on the user’s distance from London, as one might think, because the servers were not located in a single, specific area. Instead they were spread out around the world to provide the best possible service to all visitors. The site administrators chose to host their site with a CDN operator which reduplicated the website a great number of times so that the distance between it and the user was reduced to a minimum. The delay for updating information increased slightly, but this is a particularly minor inconvenience compared to the viewing comfort provided daily to the millions of visitors that the Olympics drew to the official web site. The differences in performance can be accounted for, in this case, by the capacity of ‘local’ networks, peering agreements (interconnection of the networks of different operators), local performance and ability to handle high audience loads, etc. Chinese web surfers, moreover, were penalized by the famous digital Wall of China and by the poor interaction of networks in the north of the country with those in the south.


A 30th Gold Medal for Great Britain Everyone is aware that the organization of an event of this scale is not limited to the sports component. The consensus seems to be that London 2012 was a perfect success from start to finish. There were no major snags to cause concern, whether in the sporting events or in services to the public. Our study shows that virtual visitors were as well provided for as those who were lucky enough to actually travel to the Olympics. The site administrators made use of all available technical means, and simulated the behavior of the web site in step with expected audience fluctuations and the massive arrival of web visitors by resorting to tools that specialized organisms, like ip-label, are able to provide. British athletes brilliantly won 65 medals, 29 of which were gold. The teams that took part in designing and operating the web site of the Olympic Games incontestably deserve a gold medal as well. Let’s wager their Brazilian counterparts will take it to heart to do as well for the 31st Olympiad. They now have less than four years to make it happen.

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The 2012 London Olympics - ip-label · 2019-04-03 · Reproduction or communication of any part of this document is not allowed without express permission from ip-label. The 2012