ZDNet UK 26/10/2001: "Home Office admits data retention plans "

Owen Blacker owen.blacker at wheel.co.uk
Tue, 30 Oct 2001 09:46:18 -0000


 
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Caspar, quoting Ben Laurie:
>
> > Yes, that's so much more useful than real-world information.
> 
> So can you tell how many web pages on average a customer of a large ISP
> accesses ? I estimated fifty, I would be surprised if it were five
> thousand (two orders of magnitude). The other figures in the calculation
> are constant.

Thinking about it (again, the head-full-of-cold disclaimer is being applied
 :) , I'd guess that 50 pages is a little low, but of a the right kind of
order of magnitude, perhaps, maybe two- or three-fold short at a maximum,
for someone who isn't quite as Net-obsessed as I.

But add to that the requests for all the embedded images, stylesheets,
JavaScripts, favicon.ico images for every IE bookmarking and so on...

Looking at the large client site for whom I have access to log analyses,
the ratio between hits and page impressions (ie any-file as opposed to
distinct-HTML-or-ASP-not-counting-its-images-separately) is broadly 4:1. 
The ratio between hits and user sessions is more than 50:1.

I reckon, thus, that Caspar's estimate for pages is ~roughly~ right, but
would produce traffic logs of the order of those Ben Laurie was suggesting.

HTH,


O x
- -- 
Owen Blacker
Senior Software Developer / InfoSec Consultant    Wheel: Clerkenwell
See http://www.owens-place.org.uk/pgp.html -- more about my PGP keys
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