Nearly a million visitors are expected for the Olympic Games. The Olympics will be streamed like never before. The BBC predicts that its live footage, streamed to computers across Britain, will generate in excess of a terabit (1 trillion bits) per second of traffic at peak times – the equivalent of 1,500 people downloading a feature-length DVD-quality movie every minute. Is the Olympic website (London2012.com) ready for an onslaught of traffic? Wired Enterprise reports that The London Olympics Organizing Committee turned to cloud testing specialist SOASTA to stress test the Olympic web site. SOASTA engineers spent six months working with the committee to simulate traffic not only to the Olympics website but across the many mobile apps that tie into it. The result, according to SOASTA CEO Tom Lounibos, is that the London Olympics website is probably better tested any Olympics site in the web’s short history. Lounibos says SOASTA has ensured that the site can handle traffic from as many as 1 billion people over the course of the games.

Others are not so sure. An analysis by Compuware found that London2012.com performed poorly in a number of key metrics. Michael Allen, Director of IT service management at Compuware, said that the Olympics site made more than 260 server requests to load some pages. ““As the traffic increases we expect that some of the architectural issues that we have identified will proliferate to what is a performance problem,” Allen told ComputerWorld UK. “The number of requests, for example, is probably okay if you only have a few hundred users accessing it concurrently. “However, if you have thousands it’s going to put the servers under increased pressure.”

I guess we shall have to wait and see.

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