Google Brazil is Google's best performer

Stuart Corner
Saturday, 29 September 2007 06:40

Your IT - Home IT

What's 0.008 percent between friends? That's the difference between the uptime of Google's best and worst performing national search sites and it means the worst had 10 times the downtime of the best.

Google has a large number of localised versions of the Google Search homepage, and Internet monitoring company, Pingdom, monitored the uptime of 32 of these for a whole year (1 September 2006-  September 2007) to see how they perform on availability (uptime).

The website with the most downtime was the Swedish Google Search (www.google.se) which was unavailable a total of 48 minutes. The website with the least downtime was the Brazilian Google Search (www.google.com.br) which was unavailable for a total of only three minutes. The American Google Search (www.google.com) ended up in position 26 out of 32, with 99.994 percent availability and 31 minutes of downtime. Australia fared slightly better with 99.995 percent availability and 26 minutes of downtime. Barely bettering Sweden were Singapore and Taiwan with 99.991 percent availability and 46 minutes total downtime each.

Pingdom observes that "It is interesting that several countries not traditionally associated with a good Internet infrastructure ended up in top positions with very little downtime....Brazil, India, Thailand and Mexico. Sweden on the other hand has a reputation for being one of the forerunners on the Internet [as does Singapore], so it is very surprising to find the Swedish Google Search at the bottom of the list.

Pingdom concluded that, with none of the monitored websites passing below 99.99 percent uptime, Google's performance "has to be considered extremely good, even for a company with the resources of Google."