RULE ORGANIZATION FOR EFFICIENT TRANSACTION PATTERN MATCHING

Efficiently identifying transactions processed by a software application, such as a server application is disclosed. In one embodiment, transactions are identified by applying a set of rules to communications between a client and server to determine whether certain patterns are in the communications. For example, the rules may look for some combination of parameters in the transactions. As a particular example, the rules may be used to look for parameters in HTTP requests. The rules are organized in a way that allows efficient processing. For example, the rules may be organized based on the frequency with which the parameters are expected to occur in the transactions and the frequency with which each transaction is expected to occur. The rules may be updated if the expected frequencies deviate from actual frequencies, such that the rules can be organized for more efficient processing.