Investigations into Session Workload and Its Properties

The World Wide Web is a popular "tool" for companies. It can be used as a method of communication between the company and its customer; it also allows companies to setup virtual storefronts that can be accessed by any customer in the world. Web servers, which provide the customers with access to these storefronts, can log customers' activities. The ability to understand their customers' behavior is extremely important as companies strive to increase the usability and reliability of their web server. Session is a popular unit of measurement used to analyze information from server logs. This work presents a timeout model that can provide more accurate session data than the commonly used 30 minute timeout value. The claim that session lengths are sampled from a heavy-tailed distribution is also rigorously examined and discovered to be questionable.