Scaling for E-Business

11.4. From HTTP Logs to CBMGs

Each customer session can be represented by a CBMG. We show here how we can obtain the CBMGs that characterize customer sessions from HTTP logs. We then show how we can group CBMGs that originate from "similar" sessions and represent each group by a CBMG. The goal is to characterize the workload by a relatively small and representative number of CBMGs as opposed to having to deal with thousands or even hundreds of thousands of CBMGs.

We discuss in what follows a process by which a small number of CBMGs can be obtained from HTTP logs. Figure 11.5 illustrates these steps. The first step consists of merging and filtering HTTP logs from the various HTTP servers of the e-commerce site to discard irrelevant entries such ...