[squid-users] Calculate time spent on website (per ip address)

[Amos Jeffries]

On 11/02/2015 10:50 a.m., Luis Miguel Silva wrote:
> Dear all,
> 
> I was wondering if there is a built in feature in Squid to calculate the
> time spent on a website, per ip address (e.g. 32 minutes between 12pm and
> 1pm, 5 minutes between 1pm and 2pm)? And, if not, how would you do it?
> 

No there is nothing built-in. The whole concept of "website" and "page"
is an abstract concept that only really exists in peoples heads, with
some browser participation. It simply does not exist at lower levels
than the browser.

Some of the Squid helpers (for auth, session, quota) use a scaling
window of time between transactions to estimate whether any two requests
are from the same end-user. But even that does not really match up well
to "website" or "page" concepts.


> I immediately thought about using the log files for this BUT, because we
> only log individual connections, how would you guys conclude the amount of
> time spent per website? Would you, for instance, for each 5 minutes, add 5
> minute chunks IF there was data flowing between the 5 minutes?

There is an entire field of research called Usability seeking to answer
that question for decades now. Its up to you.

> 
> That would work but...Isn't there a more elegant way of doing this?

Look at it from another angle. What are you trying to get out of all
this monitoring? What is the actual purpose of it?

Amos