This is a small howto on how to analyze the amount of data requests for a webserver using the access log.

/var/log/apache2

If you need older logs as well, you'll need to unpack them. They are zipped using bzip. Uncompressing them is done like this:

bunzip2 access_log-20101226.bz2

This is the command to get the requests per minute from the access log. The last sorts on the amount of requests per minute:

cat access_log | awk '{gsub("\\[",""); split($4,a,":");printf("%s:%s:%s %s\n",a[1],a[2],a[3] ,$1)}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -nk1,1