INVESTIGATING THE DISTRIBUTIONAL PROPERTY OF THE SESSION WORKLOAD
Companies now rely on the World Wide Web for communication with their customers. As reliance on web servers grows, the need for companies to better understand the workload placed upon these servers also increases. The session workload unit is a popular unit of measurement used to analyze recorded information from server logs. In fact, many web applications, from shopping carts to online banking systems, require session information to function correctly. Web data mining is also dependent on session workload information. However, the distributional properties of this session workload are not understood. Whether the session workload can be described as a short-tailed or heavy-tailed distribution is a fundamental question for the investigation of the session workload unit. This paper empirically explores claims that the session workload can be described using a heavy-tailed distribution. The paper concludes that, for the samples used in this paper, a method to accurately determine whether the session workload is drawn from a heavy-tailed distribution does not exist. Hence, the conclusion that they are drawn from such a distribution cannot be made.
web session length session workload property web log analysis