Scaling for E-Business

11.1. Introduction

Chapter 7 described the general methodology for characterizing the workload of e-commerce sites. As described in that chapter, a key issue is the characterization of customer behavior. In Chapter 2 we discussed two models for customer behavior characterization: the Customer Behavior Model Graph (CBMG) and the Customer Visit Model (CVM). The former captures the navigational pattern of a customer during a visit to the site and the latter is a less detailed representation and only captures the number of times a customer executes each of the e-business functions per session.

In this chapter, we show how CBMGs and CVMs can be obtained from HTTP logs and describe methods, based on clustering analysis, to derive small groups of CBMGs ...