I began experimenting with AWStats on Saturday and installed it on the main machine. I wanted it to parse the logfiles just like Webalizer does and added it to the cronjob to parse the logfiles once a day.
I wanted to create Webalizer like static pages and that once a day. I installed awstats on Debian using a Debian-package from backports.org and thanks to the help of this tutorial AWStats is now producing more detailed statistics than Webalizer does.
I noticed the following.
- AWStats is goddamn slow. OK, the logfiles are huge (about a gig per day) but it takes about on hour to parse one file. Here the Webalizer C-code is way ahead of the Perl-code AWStats is written in
- The total visitor count differs from the one Webalizer created. It differs not by some hundred visitors, using the logs of the website I’m administering Webalizer counted ~80.000 visitors per day, AWStats just ~ 57.000 … huh!
did you have a look at “top” while generating the statistics? for me every now and then i could see awstats.pl for a few seconds with never more than 30% cpu usage. so i figure that the dns lookups take most of the time. disable them with
DNSLookup=0
i am using webalizer as well, but the far more detailed reports of awstats make me consider switching or at least running both for a while.
cheers
17:16:52