For distributed systems to properly react to peaks of requests, their
adaptation activities would benefit from the estimation of the amount of
requests. This paper proposes a solution to produce a short-term forecast based
on data characterising user behaviour of online services. We use \emph{wavelet
analysis}, providing compression and denoising on the observed time series of
the amount of past user requests; and a \emph{recurrent neural network} trained
with observed data and designed so as to provide well-timed estimations of
future requests. The said ensemble has the ability to predict the amount of
future user requests with a root mean squared error below 0.06\%. Thanks to
prediction, advance resource provision can be performed for the duration of a
request peak and for just the right amount of resources, hence avoiding
over-provisioning and associated costs. Moreover, reliable provision lets users
enjoy a level of availability of services unaffected by load variations
