The 2012 London Olympics are underway and they’ve already run int0 a few technical problems – most notably, the Twitter overload in London. But it looks like the Olympic committee might have been set up for failure from the beginning. According to a July 9 study the official Olympics site wasn’t prepared for the sheer volume of visitors to all-things-Olympic almost a month in advance.

A test gauging site performance put the official London Olympics website – london2012.com – at the bottom of the pack. Compuware, who conducted the test, measured the performance of london2012.com, londonolympics2012.com, visitlondon.com/london2012, timeout.com/London/Olympics-2012, tfl.gov.uk and lastminute.com against median performance metrics from the Alexa 100 index. Here’s how they did it and what they were looking for, from PCWorld:

Compuware completed its analysis on 9 July using SpeedoftheWeb.org, where the websites were tested according to 15 key performance indicators relating to user experience, browser, content, network and server. The performance of the sites was benchmarked against the performance of the Alexa 100, a global web index.

You would think thatlondon2012.com would be on their A-game since they are likely to be the most popular site during the Olympics. But alas, they fell short.

London2012.com performed badly in a number of key areas. For example, the Alexa 100 median for server requests, which looks at the number of client/server interactions required to load the content of a web page, is 61. A high number of server requests indicates inefficient content delivery to the end-user, whilst putting pressure on the server.

London2012.com ranked worst in this test with 261 requests, which compares to a mere 36 requests on londonolympic2012.com. Michael Allen, Director of IT service management at Compuware said that the high number of requests could lead to the website buckling under high demand. …

Wait times were also an issue for london2012.com. The amount of time the browser spent waiting until it could start downloading resources was 1.9 seconds, which compares to 0.04 seconds on lastminute.com. This is likely to be due to a slow network connection or a large number of resources that have to be downloaded.

The total load wait time, which is when all the content on the web page is loaded, was 12.2 seconds for london2012.com, compared to the Alexa 100 median of 4.9 seconds and just 2.3 seconds on londonolympic2012.com.

Also, the amount of time spent executing client-side logic implemented in JavaScript was 3.7 seconds for london2012.com, compared to an Alexa 100 median of 0.8 seconds, or londonolympic2012.com’s time of 0.4 seconds.

Read the full article at PCWorld >>>

I haven’t heard of any major site crashes for london2012.com so maybe they managed to scrape by unscathed. Or maybe users were expecting long wait times considering the time-condensed, global nature of the games. Still, this is something future Olympic committees might want to work on before the month of the games.