Tax-Preparation Sites Pass Deadline-Day TestTax-Preparation Sites Pass Deadline-Day Test

People who failed to file their tax forms on time can't blame the Internet.

A few of the most popular tax preparation Web sites slowed a bit from the millions of last-minute tax filers, but in general, the sites performed well in speed and availability, according to Keynote Systems, which provides Internet performance-management and -testing services.

"Tax-related Web sites as a whole were resilient to the uptick in traffic as April 15 approached," Keynote analyst Roopak Patel said in a statement. "Several of the sites did show inconsistent behavior, but the duration was not long-lived, and most visitors accomplished what they needed on the Web, whether it was form downloads, information access, or filing of their tax returns online."

Beginning April 11, Keynote monitored the Web performance of the most commonly visited sites associated with income-tax submissions or tax-related information. The sites were measured for homepage download times in seconds and availability in percentage. Monitoring was done from the top 25 largest U.S. metropolitan areas over T1 lines.

In the hours leading up to the midnight April 15 deadline, the U.S. government's tax site, IRS.gov, was among those that experienced intermittent slowdowns.

The government site experienced slowdowns of as much as 8 seconds between 5 p.m. and 9 p.m. EDT on April 15, and availability decreased to less than 90 percent, said Keynote. The baseline performance for IRS.gov during other times is around 1 second for homepage downloads with nearly 100% availability.

Users of another popular tax-preparation site, Drake Software's 1040.com, encountered inconsistent performance and availability between 1 p.m. and 8 p.m. EDT on tax day.

Another notable site, Ernst & Young's www.ey.com, saw its average performance drop significantly lower than other sites. Download speeds were reduced to 11 to 12 seconds, compared with the average of 2.4 seconds for all other sites.

Tax sites monitored from 5 p.m. EDT April 11 until 9 a.m. EDT April 16, along with the average response time in seconds and availability in percent, were: IRS.gov, 1.11 seconds, 99.35% Nolo Tax Site, 1.56, 99.25% TaxCut.com, 1.83, 99.92% Amazon Tax Center, 1.86, 98.87% 1040.com, 2.09, 99.62% Jackson Hewitt, 2.57, 99.92% Intuit Turbo Tax, 2.76, 99.75% H&R Block, 2.96, 99.94% Ernst & Young, 11.81, 99.96%