SBS management conceded the company had severely underestimated the volume of traffic its popular Web-site, www.theworldgame.com.au, would attract during the game. Unprecedented traffic levels to the site severely impeded its coverage of the game and affected all 65 Web sites associated with the multi-cultural broadcaster.
One manager said the impact on SBS sites effectively resulted in a denial of service across the sites for much of the morning, with capacity falling well short of requirements.
SBS new media business development manager, Paul Vincent, said the servers supporting the www.theworldgame.com.au site started to experience difficulties handling the loads at around 8am AEST, as people who had been watching the first half of the game on television started to arrive at work and log on for coverage.
Vincent said the www.worldgame.com.au servers were capable of handling roughly double the average daily load of 100,000 page impressions. However, while the tech staff had not yet checked how many users were turned away, the site's servers were dealing with a load likely to be "many times more" than 200,000 page impressions during the game and immediately afterwards.
He said the broadcaster was already looking at load-balancing techniques it could undertake to ease the pressure and would examine its overall capacity requirements ahead of the site's next big event, the English FA Cup final.
Vincent said the traffic problems were such that correspondents looking to file on the match, and associated events, had been unable to use the content management system to upload their updates to the site.
One user told ZDNet Australia that the live text coverage of the match appeared frozen at the half-time score until well after the game's conclusion .
Vincent said SBS staff had shipped in additional equipment to ramp up capacity during last year's World Cup football, but had moved that equipment out after the tournament finished.
"We've learned a valuable lesson about what happens when the Socceroos are playing," Vincent said.
He said the world game site typically achieved 110,000 unique users and 2.5 million page impressions per month.
Other popular football sites, such as www.soccernet.com, appeared to handle traffic for that and other friendly matches overnight with minimal or no difficulties.
Australia convincingly beat the David Beckham-led England side in a match whose startup time was delayed from around 6am AEST to after 7am AEST due to terrorist threats in London.
