March Madness, Internet style

FT. LAUDERDALE, FLA. -- It's bigger than the Super Bowl, at least on the Web. The annual March Madness crush has taught sports sites a lesson in managing heavy loads on the Internet.

"I know that if someone comes to our site and I don't have the server, network capacity or problems in any of the other five bottleneck areas under control, then my customers are going to go somewhere else," says Dan Leichtenschlag, vice president of engineering and chief technology officer at SportsLine USA, based here. "Planning capacity is easy if you don't have big peaks, but we need to plan for the anomalies and peaks."

Diagram of how it works

For Leichtenschlag's CBS SportsLine site, the first four-day weekend of the tournament, March 11-14, brought nearly 5 million viewers and more than 65 million hits. Traffic peaked at 160,000 hits per minute during the long weekend.

Other sites CNN/SI, the joint venture between Sports Illustrated magazine and CNN, "saw a huge increase in traffic, especially during the Thursday and Friday game," some 254% over the previous year, says Monty Mullig, vice president of CNN Internet technologies. CNN serves up pages out of its Atlanta headquarters with Sun servers running Solaris and Netscape. The CNN/SI site uses the same pool of servers as other CNN sites: cnn.com and cnnfn.com. Mullig added that pool capacity was already high (800M bit/sec) to handle all the traffic related to the Monica Lewinsky story. Resources were merely shifted from the other sites to handle the CNN/SI load. The Sporting News reported double its typical daily load during the first days of competition. "Everything ran smoothly," said Jason Kint, executive producer at Times Mirror Interzines, TSN's parent company. Tthe Sporting News uses XOR Network Engineering in Boulder, Colorado for its site hosting. The company operated two Pentium II BSDI Unix boxes running Apache to server up content. A third machine handles any March Madness overflow traffic. "We had to add an extra server to handle our bracket game, which has 25,000 to 30,000 people participating," Kint said. "Everybody wants to get in five minutes after the brackets are released."

To keep up with demand, SportsLine uses three data centers in, Herndon, Va., Santa Clara, Calif. and in the home office of Ft. Lauderdale, Fla. The Virginia and California sites are operated by Exodus Communications. Multiple T-3 lines come into each center. In total, SportsLine has 18 Sun servers running Netscape's Enterprise Web server.

SportsLine has set up an elaborate DNS scheme that ideally directs surfers to the site with the least number of hops to it, Leichtenschlag says. If one site is overloaded, page requests can be re-directed to one of the other two data centers. SportsLine uses Cisco's LoadDirector to balance the load between sites.

Leichtenschlag says he uses Exodus to help offset the cost of running multiple T-3 lines. "We don't want all the T-3 lines in the [Ft. Lauderdale] office; that is a terrible economic model."

All told, SportsLine can pump out 900M bit/sec of data, Leichtenschlag says. During the first weekend of the tournament, peak demand reached 100M bit/sec.

Leichtenschlag says planning begins six months in advance for March Madness and other big events.

The company learned a valuable lesson during its first March Madness, in 1996, when demand for information far exceeded the site's capacity.

"It was our first year in business and we didn't expect that event to be a mega traffic generator ... we thought it would be high, but not that high," Leichtenschlag said. "Every year since we've made sure we established and extrapolated what we thought would happen."

Every year the tournament's effect on sports sites has grown. In SportsLine's case, that's at least partly due to the way its URL is now seen all over CBS broadcasts of the games. Commentators and graphics are constantly reminding viewers of the online counterpart to the broadcast.

This year SportsLine added three servers just to handle its own bracket game where users can make and track their picks online, in hopes of winning one of many major prizes.

Not surprisingly, visits are particularly abundant on weekdays, when people with money riding on bets in office pools want to get scores quickly.

"We've had a historic pattern in which traffic is heaviest on Thursday and Friday because people are at work and don't have a TV, but still want to see scores and how well they did in their pools," Leichtenschlag says.

The site now features real-time game information for those fans.

Using a "Tournament Live" Java applet, surfers can get current scores, information on specific shots and players and chat with other enthusiasts.

SportsLine has eight servers dedicated just to Tournament Live, along with numerous incoming wire feeds and humans watching the games to pump out all the information, according to Dan Smith, SportsLine's vice president of multimedia technology.

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