Web log analysis: Experimental studies

With rapid growth of the World Wide Web, web performance becomes increasingly important for modern businesses, especially for e-commerce. As we all know, web server logs contain potentially useful empirical data to improve web server performance. In this thesis, we discuss some topics related to the analysis of a website's server logs for enhancing server performance, which will benefit some applications in business. Markov chain models are used and allow us to dynamically model page sequences extracted from server logs. My experimental studies contain three major parts. First, I present a workload characterization study of the website used for my research. Second, Markov chain models are constructed for both page request and page-visiting sequence prediction. Finally, I carefully evaluate the constructed models using an independent test data set, which is from server logs on a different day. The research results demonstrate the effectiveness of Markov chain models for characterizing page-visiting sequences.