Iraq War Internet Performance Reports From Keynote; Over Last Two Days U.S. Army and Marine Web Sites Suffer Serious Performance Degradation.

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

Topical News: War On Terrorism

SAN MATEO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--March 20, 2003

As the first full day of the war campaign against Iraq came to life today, Keynote Systems (Nasdaq:KEYN) announced that it would issue a regular 'Iraq War Internet Performance Report' that provides data and analysis regarding the performance of major Internet backbones and important government, commercial, media and anti-war Web sites. With Americans and much of the world increasingly relying on the Internet as a vital communications link, and heightened concerns about cyber-terrorism, Keynote is making its data and analysis available both on its Web site at www.keynote.com on behalf of the Internet-using public, and directly to media via e-mail at approximately 10:00 AM EST each day a report is issued.

Over the last two days leading up to war, overall Internet performance among major U.S. backbones has been normal. Keynote measures real-time performance latency between the major U.S. Internet backbones and makes its data available at: www.internethealthreport.com.

Overall Web performance for both major business sites (the Keynote Business 40 index) and major U.S. government sites (the Keynote Government 40 index) has also been normal. These indices can be accessed at: www.keynote.com/solutions/solutions_pm_performance_indices_tpl.html

There have been a few notable exceptions:

-- The public U.S. Army home page, www.army.mil/ has had severe problems. These started on Monday, March 17, and appear to be associated with Web server capacity ssues. The Army home page typically takes 4 seconds to download on a high-speed Internet connection. On Wednesday during peak hours it averaged more than 80 seconds, 20 times longer than usual. Availability of the home page also plunged from the normal 93%. On Wednesday, March 19, the U.S. Army home page was at or below 70% availability during the day.

-- The public U.S. Marine Corps home page, www.usmc.mil/ also has had problems on March 19. Unlike the situation for the Army, these problems appeared to be associated with bandwidth issues; the "pipe" between the U.S. Marine Corps Web server and the Internet may be too small. Availability has not suffered, but average download time for the home page measured on high-speed Internet connections soared on Wednesday from the usual 4.5 seconds to over 30 seconds.

Unlike the Army site's performance, which has been getting progressively worse each day, the Marine Corps site's performance actually improved since Tuesday. (On Tuesday during peak hours, the Marine Corps home page average download time measured on high-speed Internet connections was approximately 50 seconds.) This improvement appears to be because the Marine Corps is taking actions to decrease the size of its Web page.

-- There has been minor performance degradation on the public

U.S. Department of Defense home page, www.dod.mil/. Between

9:00 am and 2:00 pm EST on Wednesday, March 19, performance

slowed to 5 seconds to download a Web page instead of the

usual, fast one second. There was a similar, although smaller,

peak on Tuesday March 18.

-- There was some minor performance degradation for the Federal

Emergency Management Agency (FEMA, www.fema.com) on March 18,

during peak hours. There were no problems yesterday.

Some European sites are showing similar difficulties; an example is the Home Office in the U.K. (www.homeoffice.gov.uk/), which exhibited poor performance on Wednesday during working hours when measured from the U.K. Home page download time, which is normally approximately one second when accessed from high-speed Internet connections, jumped to over 15 seconds. Availability dropped below 80%.

In general, major news sites are not showing any unusual problems at this time.

For both the Army and the Marine Corps sites, load testing across the Internet, as is done by major Web commercial sites before major selling seasons and by major news organizations preparing for news events, could have been used to avoid the problems that have been seen.

Keynote will be adding sites to measure over the coming days and weeks as the war progresses, looking for performance issues and other Internet problems.

Keynote is actively measuring a large number of major government, news organization, and other war-related sites from Keynote's infrastructure of more than 100 monitoring locations in most of the major cities of the world on most of the major Internet backbones in the world. That will enable Keynote to report quickly on major Web and Internet performance problems, whether caused by overloading or by other situations.

Here's a sample of some typical sites being measured by Keynote:

News Organizations:
Al-Jazeera
BBC
CNN
ITV
Jerusalem Post
New York Times

Government Organizations:
U.S. Department of Homeland Security
FBI
U.K. Foreign Office
U.K. Ministry of Defense
U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)
U.S. Department of Defense
U.S. Air Force
U.S. Army
U.S. Marines
White House

Other Organizations:
AlterNet
Iraq Journal
MoveOn
United For Peace

Internet backbone performance in the U.S. is always available in real-time on http://www.internethealthreport.com. Keynote is also continuing to measure the standard Keynote performance indices, such as the Keynote Business 40, the Keynote Government 40, and equivalent international indices such as the Keynote Europe 20 and the Asian indices. Those indices will show if there are widespread Web problems in any area of the world.

About Keynote

Keynote Systems (Nasdaq:KEYN), The Internet Performance Authority(R), is the global leader in Internet performance management and testing services that improve the quality of e-business. Keynote's services enable corporate enterprises to benchmark, diagnose, test and manage their e-business systems both inside and outside the firewall. Approximately 2,300 corporate IT departments and 17,000 individual subscribers rely on the company's easy-to-use and cost-effective services to optimize revenues and reduce downtime costs without requiring additional complex and costly software implementations.

Keynote Systems, Inc. was founded in 1995 and is headquartered in San Mateo, California. The company can be reached at www.keynote.com or by phone in the U.S. at 650-403-2400.

Note to Editors: Keynote and The Internet Performance Authority are registered trademarks of Keynote Systems, Inc. Other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. t Journal, R