How to determine concurrent user counts from apache logs

Question

We have 3 months of Apache logs and we need to determine what is the maximum number of concurrent connections that we've received.

I've used AWStats and I don't think this is something that it generates. Is there another tool that will give us this kind of information from the logs?

Solution

You can't do it with the default common or combined log formats without baking in some assumptions. For instance if you assume that all your responses take 500ms, then you can take the number of log-lines per second and divide in half.

What would probably be easiest is to use something like munin or cacti to poll the values from mod_status. Or you could watch netstat output for a couple dozen samples over the next few days, then use that to estimate a rough ratio of concurrent connections to traffic for your site.

Comments

[Admin]

Your title is "concurrent user" and your content is "concurrent connections" - these are different things - which do you want?