Analysing Tail Heaviness of Web Server Data
Dais George, Sebastian George
International Journal of Web Applications, Vol. 1, No. 4, 2009.
DOI: 
Link: http://dline.info/ijwa/fulltext/v1n403.pdf
Abstract:
Empirical studies of the web traffic have found evidence of heavy tails in the distribution of file sizes. This empirically observed omni presence of heavy tails has serious concerns among researchers who are interested in analyzing characteristics of web server performance. Various methods for estimating tail index a are reviewed. They include the hill estimator, its alternatives, Weighted Hill estimator and the qq-estimator. A new tail index estimator is also proposed which is obtained by smoothing the Weighted Hill estimator. Examples are given using simulated Pareto data and web server file size data of a University web server. Bootstrap confidence intervals and coverage probabilities are also computed.