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By Ben King, 12 June 2002 17:00

NEWS It's been the most surprising contest in World Cup history, but one prediction has come true - World Cup sites have been staggering under the weight of online football fans. Even top name sites struggled to deal with the volume of traffic. Of the sites silicon.com surveyed with the help of Mercury Interactive, the two worst performers were SoccerNet, www.soccernet.com , and the BBC, www.bbc.co.uk. During England's epic (if slightly dull) clash with Nigeria in Osaka, SoccerNet was registering response times in excess of 12 seconds, with some responses taking over 100 seconds. It wasn't until halfway through the game that the site's response times fell below eight seconds. This is a relatively long time for a page to download, and is used as the threshold at which most viewers will have lost patience and moved on to a different site. And by 12 seconds, the site is close to unusable. The BBC also had some France-like upsets, with slow performance between 07:30 (BST) and 08:30 (BST), roughly corresponding to the first half of the match. Page downloads from the BBC's homepage and fixtures guide were both taking as long as 100 seconds, with pages being lost along the way. OneFootball www.onefootball.com also had sticky moments during the game, with average response times occasionally peaking above the 12 second threshold. Even the official Fifa World Cup site, fifaworldcup.yahoo.com, had some performance problems during the match, with response times slowing around the half time whistle. Betting sites fared better than the pure information portals, though TotalBet www.totalbet.com did have one hairy moment during the match. The same sites which struggled during the Nigeria match also suffered capacity problems during England's earlier clash with Argentina (see http://www.silicon.com/a53904 ), suggesting that these results are far from a freak. If anything the situation for the Argentina match was worse. Even the mighty Yahoo! UK suffered a brief slowdown at the start of England's historic victory, with response times rising above eight seconds for the start of the match. Andy Crosby, European product marketing director at Mercury Interactive, said: "These results are indicative of a huge load on these sites during matches. The lesson is that companies need to pre-empt peak loads, but that's incredibly difficult. They must capacity plan and keep on testing." Mercury interactive monitored a range of URLs from football, general interest and betting sites, including: www.yahoo.co.uk, www.soccernet.com, fifaworldcup.yahoo.com/en/t/s, www.onefootball.com, www.thefa.com, www.bbc.co.uk, www.ladbrokes.co.uk, www.willhill.com, www.totalbet.com, www.bluesq.com, and www.eurobet.co.uk .