Title: Characteristics of WWW Client-based Traces
Author: Carlos Cunha, Azer Bestavros, and Mark Crovella
Date: April 1, 1995 (modified July 18, 1995)

Abstract:

The explosion of WWW traffic necessitates an accurate picture of WWW
use, and in particular requires a good understanding of client
requests for WWW documents.  To address this need, we have collected
traces of actual executions of NCSA Mosaic, reflecting over half a
million user requests for WWW documents.  In this paper we present a
descriptive statistical summary of the traces we collected, which
identifies a number of trends and reference patterns in WWW use.  In
particular, we show that many characteristics of WWW use can be
modelled using power-law distributions, including the distribution of
document sizes, the popularity of documents as a function of size, the
distribution of user requests for documents, and the number of
references to documents as a function of their overall rank in
popularity (Zipf's law).  In addition, we show how the power-law
distributions derived from our traces can be used to guide system
designers interested in caching WWW documents. 
---
Our client-based traces are available via FTP from 
ftp://cs-ftp.bu.edu/techreports/1995-010-www-client-traces.tar.gz