Re: [squid-users] User browsing time estimate

On Thu, 2002-10-10 at 11:26, Joshua Penix wrote:
> Much to my dismay, I've got a boss asking for user web-browsing reports from
> our Squid cache. I used 'sarg' to give him a general idea of the browsing
> patterns, but he wants more specific hours. He wants to know "roughly how
> much time has <blank> spent browsing the internet?"
>
> I attempted to explain that we don't really have enough data to produce such
> a report - all we know is when someone asked for a webpage, we don't know
> how long that person spend reading it. However, upon further discussion it
> was decided that we could get a rough estimate by applying a "moving window"
> analysis to browsing logs. Basically if a user hits pages roughly every 30
> seconds between at 9:05AM and 9:20AM, we could safely assume that he/she was
> browsing the internet for ~15 minutes that morning.

Yep, thats the only way to assess browser usage.

> If our moving window was 5 minutes, and the user didn't hit any pages after
> 9:20AM until 11:15AM, we can assume that they stopped browsing at ~9:20, add
> 15 minutes to their "total time on the internet" report, and then start
> accumulating time all over again based on the 11:15 session.
>
> Surely I could sit down and write a Perl log analyzer which makes these
> assumptions, but I'm hoping someone else already has. I looked at all the
> analyzers linked from squid-cache.org, and didn't really find anything that
> seems to fit. Anyone have ideas on this?

I've not heard of any, but I'd guess that webalyzer would be a close
match, and relatively easy to extend to do that.

Cheers,
Rob