Weather.gov weak even without blizzard, study says
Website failed as monster storm approached
- By Alice Lipowicz
- Feb 02, 2011
The National Weather Service’s Weather.gov website reportedly buckled under the strain of millions of extra visitors this week while a large swath of the country prepared for a monster blizzard.
But even on an average day, Weather.gov’s performance is weak, according to an independent test of the site’s overall speed, page-loading speed and other performance measures conducted by Indeep76's Site Speed Laboratory in December 2010.
“Based on our speed test results table and considering features of the current webserver location (Laurel, Md.), we concluded overall Weather.gov speed rank is 30,” Indeep76 said in its report. “This is a weak result.”
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The test also concluded that Weather.gov’s page-loading speed was slow
and its domain name lookup speed was average. Latency, the speed of
exchange between the user’s computer and the website’s server, was good,
Indeep76 said.
“After the winter storm is over we'll take a close, hard look at the test results,” Curtis Carey, a spokesman for the NWS, said today. "In light of this storm, we'll reevaluate the modest plan we have for upgrades this year. We think the current equipment held out for as long as it could,” he said.
Starting Jan. 30, when the latest major snowstorm began gathering momentum, traffic on Weather.gov has been about five
times higher than average, resulting in periods in which the website has
been unavailable, according to a report from CBS News today.
The
massive storm struck the Midwest on Feb. 1 and was moving eastward
along an 800-mile front. It is dumping snow and ice across many areas of
the country.
"We're looking at unprecedented demand from this
event," Carey told CBS News.
"We're talking 15 to 20 million hits an hour on our Web servers. That's
far beyond anything we've seen in the past."
As a result of the surge
in use, website visitors reported difficulty accessing weather
forecasts and radar imagery, CBS said, adding that the problems appeared
to be fixed by the evening of Jan. 31.
The issues were first reported in a Washington Post article published Feb. 1.
This
is not the first time Weather.gov has been criticized for its design
and performance. In 2010, an article on CQ Roll Call’s Congress.org
rated it the second worst federal website, saying its maps were
confusing and its graphics awkwardly sized.
“The website has...10
million things on the front page," Owen Astrachan, a computer science
professor at Duke University, told Congress.org.
About the Author
Alice Lipowicz is a staff writer covering government 2.0, homeland security and other IT policies for Federal Computer Week.