Google Traffic Appeared To Slow SEC Site

Google's filing of an initial public offering created so much Internet traffic that it appeared to significantly slow down the homepage performance of the Security Exchange Commission's web site, an Internet performance tracking company said Friday.

The Internet search company's highly anticipated filing on Thursday increased traffic to the SEC site by as much as 900 percent, Keynote Systems said.

From 2:30 p.m. to 3:30 p.m. EDT, it took as long as 45 seconds to download the SEC homepage from 10 of the most populous geographic areas in the U.S., Keynote said. The page normally takes four seconds to download.

During that same hour, the success rate for downloading the page dropped to as low as 20 percent, compared to the normal rate of 100 percent.

"Government sites are very good about success rates so this is definitely somewhat of an anomaly," Keynote analyst Roopak Patel said in a statement. "Clearly, there is great interest in something newsworthy on the site -- most likely Google's IPO filing."The Mountain View, Calif., company's stock registration statement, filed with the SEC, was the initial step in a stock sale expected to raise as much as $2.7 billion. The IPO could put a value of $20 billion on Google, making it the largest Internet company to go public since the end of the dot-com investment craze about four years ago.