According to IBM, Black Friday 2012 sales increased by 20%, Cyber Monday by 30% from last year.
We monitored the web performance of 70 website (Excluding Netflix, Blockbuster, 1800 Flowers, Scholastic, and Redcats USA ) from our US Nodes using Internet Explorer 8 browser. The goal was to compare the performance of the sites and to see how well each website handled the traffic during the event.
This year we did not see the same issues as last year, most companies were very well prepared to handle the traffic surge. 
The only interesting development this year was the number of issues related to 3rd parties tags on web sites.
Date: November 20 2012 from 00:00 EDT to November 27 2012 04:00 AM EDT
DNS Time:
Fastest: HSN 4 ms
Slowest: JC Penney 271 ms
Wait Time:
Fastest: Costco & Apple 4 ms
Slowest: Salt Life 1,597 ms
Response Time:
Fastest: Kohl 53 ms
Slowest: Salt Life 1,913 ms
Render Start Time:
Fastest: Buy.com 394 ms
Slowest: Salt Life 3,631 ms
Document Complete Time:
Fastest: Walgreen 822 ms
Slowest: Barnes&Nobles: 9,782 ms
Web Page Response:
Fastest: Apple 1,405 ms
Slowest: Barnes&Nobles: 11,075 ms
Total Downloaded Bytes:
Lightest Page: Amazon Supply 266 kbytes
Heaviest Page: Lego: 7,944 kbytes
Number of Requests per Page:
Least: Amazon Supply 16 requests
Most: Barnes&Nobles 262 requests
Number of Hosts per Page:
Least: Amway 2 hosts
Most: Neiman Marcus 49 hosts
Correlation between Metrics:
Interval: 5 minutes from 10 US Cities (Las Vegas, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington DC, Miami, San Francisco, San Jose, Seattle & Portland)
Metrics Calculation: Metrics display median value.
Page Load Time: The time it takes the browser to download and render the page. This is the time when the browser states “Done” in the status bar – or the mouse changes from “Waiting” state to a pointer.
Render Start Time: The time it takes for the page to start displaying something other than white space.
The Catchpoint Team.
Photo by tshe
