OPTIMAL WEBSERVER SESSION TIMEOUT SETTINGS FOR WEB USERS

From an end user’s point of view, too short a Webserver timeout implies too many forced logouts, and too long a timeout duration poses a higher security risk to users’ sensitive data. We propose cost functions to select the timeout value, which are based on the solutions of a Markov regenerative process model. We discover that the distributions of user think time and server response time are important in determining the optimal timeout value. We thus present a non-parametric algorithm that dynamically estimates the optimal timeout without assuming a prior knowledge of the distributions.