  Graph processing is becoming increasingly prevalent across many application
domains. In spite of this prevalence, there is little research about how graphs
are actually used in practice. We performed an extensive study that consisted
of an online survey of 89 users, a review of the mailing lists, source
repositories, and whitepapers of a large suite of graph software products, and
in-person interviews with 6 users and 2 developers of these products. Our
online survey aimed at understanding: (i) the types of graphs users have; (ii)
the graph computations users run; (iii) the types of graph software users use;
and (iv) the major challenges users face when processing their graphs. We
describe the participants' responses to our questions highlighting common
patterns and challenges. Based on our interviews and survey of the rest of our
sources, we were able to answer some new questions that were raised by
participants' responses to our online survey and understand the specific
applications that use graph data and software. Our study revealed surprising
facts about graph processing in practice. In particular, real-world graphs
represent a very diverse range of entities and are often very large,
scalability and visualization are undeniably the most pressing challenges faced
by participants, and data integration, recommendations, and fraud detection are
very popular applications supported by existing graph software. We hope these
findings can guide future research.
