11.2. Workload Characterization of Web Traffic

There is a significant body of work on workload characterization of Web traffic. A very helpful survey can be found in a paper by Pitkow [22]. The workload characterization studies described in that paper attempt at detecting invariants, i.e., regular and predictable patterns, of Web traffic from measurements taken at clients, proxy servers, servers, and the Web as a whole. Even though the focus of this chapter is on workload characterization for e-commerce, it is important to review some of the results obtained in the analysis of information retrieval Web servers.

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