So many people asked for the feature, so finally, we have let go, and DTC can generate statistics with the infamous awstats (deactivated by default). Still, we consider that awstats can be harmful, and we do not advise you to use it at all, even though DTC supports it. Here is why.
AWStats is the slowest of them all
Calculating statistics is CPU intensive. It has always been like this, and there is no hope for something really fast. The thing is that webalizer or visitors authors have perfectly understand this issue, and decided to write something relatively optimized, using the C language.
Unfortunately, such thing is not truth at all for AWStats. This software is SLOW. But when I mean slow, we are not talking about twice slower here. I'm talking about something like 100 times slower than Webalizer. An operation that you wouldn't even notice when using webalizer (faster than a second) can take more than a minute with AWStats.
Now, imagine you have a busy website, with let's say tens of thousands of requests per day. This is not so enormous, but this is enough to render stats calculation really annoying with awstats. It's going to make your web server do stupid calculation for a VERY LONG amount of time, sometimes hours.
AWStats is using perl
For that kind of program, this is a design mistake. End of the line.
AWStats uses too much memory
As a concequence of using perl, and not being optimized, AWStats uses A LOT of memory. This can even bring your server down if you don't have so much memory available.
There are alternatives
Everybody told me that AWStats is making better statistics. Ok, but there are alternatives, like webalizer or visitors. If you think that these 2 are not complete enough, why don't you contribute to these very good projects? I'm sure the authors will be very happy to accept your contributions. And this is why open source exists: so there can be contributors. Do not always take, give a bit as well...
Conclusion
This only expresses my (Thomas Goirand) opinion. On non-busy sites, it won't harm your server that much (but then, if it's a non-busy web site, why do you want statistics at all???).
After reading this, feel free to do what you want, you've been warned.
Editing this page means accepting its license.
