Characterizing Web user sessions

  • Authors:
  • Martin Arlitt

  • Affiliations:
  • Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, Palo Alto, CA

  • Venue:
  • ACM SIGMETRICS Performance Evaluation Review
  • Year:
  • 2000

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Abstract

This paper presents a detailed characterization of user sessions to the 1998 World Cup Web site. This study analyzes data that was collected from the World Cup site over a three month period. During this time the site received 1.35 billion requests from 2.8 million distinct clients. This study focuses on numerous user session characteristics, including distributions for the number of requests per session, number of pages requested per session, session length and inter-session times. This paper concludes with a discussion of how these characteristics can be utilized in improving Web server performance in terms of the end-user experience.