AWStats - Web Hosting Providers compatibility

AWStats logfile analyzer 3.2 Documentation

Log analyzers Comparisons

Comparison between AWStats and other famous statistics tools

Features	AWStats	Analog	Webalizer	HitBox
Release date	3.2 - October 2001	5.03 - July 2001	2.01 - September 2000	NA
Language	Perl "ready to run"	C	C	Embedded HTML tag
Available on all platforms	Yes	Yes	Yes	NA
Sources available	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Price/Licence	Free	Free	Free	Free but with adverts
Works with Apache combined (XLF/ELF) or personalized log format	Yes	Yes	Yes	NA
Works with Apache common (CLF) log format	Just some features	Just some features	Just some features	NA
Works with IIS (W3C) log format	Yes	Yes	No	NA
Update of statistics from	command line and/or a browser (CGI)	command line only	command line only	browser only
Reverse DNS lookup	Yes	Yes	Yes	NA
Process logs splited by load balancing systems	Yes	Yes	No	No
Report number of "human" visits	Yes	No	Yes	Yes
Report unique "human" visitors	Yes	No	No	Yes
Stats for unique visitors are based on	Pages *****	Not supported	Hits *****	Pages *****
Report domains/countries (nb detected)	Yes (259)	Yes (252)	Yes (252)	Yes (?)
Report authenticated users	Yes	Yes	No	No
Report/Filter robots (nb detected)	Yes/Yes (258**)	Yes/No (?**)	No/No (0**)	No/No (0**)
Report rush hours	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Report days of week	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Report most often viewed pages	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Report entry pages	Yes	No	No	Yes
Detection of CGI pages as pages (and not just hits)	Yes	Yes	Only if prog ends by ".cgi"	Yes
Report web compression statistics (mod_gzip)	Yes	No	No	No
Report file types	Yes	Yes	No	No
Report average file size	No	Yes	No	No
Report browsers (nb detected)	Yes (72*)	No	Yes (4*)	Yes (<20*)
Report details of browsers versions	Yes	No	No	Yes
Report OS (nb detected)	Yes (28)	Yes (25)	No (0)	?
Report search engines used (nb detected)	Yes (56***)	No (0)	No (0)	Yes (<20 ***)
Report keywords/keyphrases used on search engines (nb detected)	No/Yes (65***)	Yes/Yes (5***)	No/Yes (14***)	Yes/No (<20***)
Report HTTP Errors	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Report 404 Errors	Nb + List last date/referer	Nb only	Nb only	No
Daily statistics	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Monthly statistics	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Yearly statistics	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Benchmark with no DNS lookup in lines/seconds (full features enabled, with XLF format, on Athlon 1Ghz)	3000****	?****	3700****	NA No program to run
Benchmark with DNS lookup in lines/seconds (full features enabled, with XLF format, on Athlon 1Ghz)	80****	80****	80****	NA No program to run
Main graphical statistics in one page	Yes	Yes	Yes	No

* This number is not really the number of browsers detected. All browsers (known and unknown) can be detected by products that support this feature (AWStats,Webalizer,HitBox). The number is only the number of known browsers for which different versions can be grouped in one browser name.

** AWStats can detect robots visits: All robots among the most common are detected, list is in robotslist.txt (214Kb). Products that are not able to do this give you false information, above all if your site has few visitors. For example, if you're site was submited to all famous search engines, robots can make 500 visits a month, to find updates or to see if your site is still online. So, if you have only 2000 visits a month, products with no robot detection capabilities (all products except AWStats) will report 2500 visits (A 25% error !). AWStats will report 500 visits from robots and 2000 visits from human visitors.

*** AWStats has url syntax rules for the most popular search engines but AWStats has also an algorithm to detect keywords of unknown search engines with unknown url syntax rule. Those rules are updated with AWStats updates.

**** This rate is for processing log records with full information (combined XLF/ELF or extended W3C log format) but you must keep in mind that all this times are without reverse DNS lookup. DNS lookup speed depends on your system, network and Internet but not on the log analyzer you use. For this reason, DNS lookup is disabled in all log analyzer benchmarks. So log analyzers benchmarks means "nothing" because the reverse DNS lookup is 95% (even with a lookup cache) of the time used by a log analyzer, and total time of the process will be nearly the same whatever is the speed of the log analyzer if DNS lookup is not already made in log file.
Webalizer is said to be able to process log with a 10000 lines/second rate but information are limited to number of hits, domains and pages (with standard log) and, for the same reason of very high time of reverse DNS lookup process, this speed means something only if DNS lookup is already done in your log (and this is not the case for 99% of web sites).

***** Some visitors use a lot of proxy servers to surf (ie: AOL users), this means it's possible that several hosts (with several IP addresses) are used to reach your site for only one visitor (ie: one proxy server download the page and 2 other servers download all images). Because of this, if stats of unique visitors are made on "Hits", 3 users are reported but it's wrong. So AWStats, like HitBox, considers only HTML pages to count unique visitors. This decrease the error (not totally, because it's always possible that a proxy server download one HTML frame and another one download another frame).