Re: Estimating number of users with number of IPs

On Thu, 11 Dec 1997, Hyunchul Kim wrote:

> Greetings!!
> i'd like to ask a question about the relationship between
> the number of users and IPs.
> maybe it could be calculated as .... (IPs * X), i think.
> does anybody know the reasonable value of X or other formula, if any?

"X" depends on your user population, I guess. For example, if your Squid
serves PC clusters at some university, X will be very large (30-40?). If the
cache is for research workstations in the CS department, X will be close to 1.
If you have a mixture, you can calculate X if you know the proportion of the
components.

For a cluster-like scenario, I believe you can validate your calculations by
using a fairly simple script that counts the number of "startup pages"
requested from Squid during the day. It is probably feasible to guess what
the startup page is for every regular client by analizing access logs for a
week or so. It will be a page that "often" starts a sequence of requests from
a particular client after a "long" idle period. Counting just the number of
idle periods might work as well provided your clients do not "sleep" at the
terminal with the browser running.

Also, in many cluster-like environments, you know a priory what the startup
page is (e.g. a University Home Page).

Alex.

P.S. I assume you are talking about leaf proxies.
Received on Thu Dec 11 1997 - 06:28:22 MST