AWStats logfile analyzer 6.6 Documentation

Log analyzers Comparisons

Comparison between AWStats and other famous statistics tools

Features/Softwares	AWStats	Analog	Webalizer	HitBox
Version - Date	6.5 - December 2005	6.0 - December 2004	2.01-10 - April 2002	NA
Language	Perl	C	C	Embedded HTML tag
Available on all platforms	Yes	Yes	Yes	NA
Sources available	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Price/Licence	Free/GPL	Free/GPL	Free/GPL	Free with adverts/Proprietary
Works with Apache combined (XLF/ELF)	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	Need a patch	NA
Works with personalized log format	Yes	Yes	No	NA
Analyze Web/Ftp/Mail log files	Yes/Yes/Yes	Yes/No/No	Yes/No/No	NA/No/No
Update of statistics from	command line (CLI) and/or a browser (CGI)	command line (CLI) and/or a browser (CGI)	command line	NA
Internal reverse DNS lookup	Yes	Yes	Yes	NA
DNS cache file	Static and dynamic	Static or dynamic	Static or dynamic	NA
Process logs spitted 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
Report session duration	Yes	No	No	Yes
Not ordered records tolerance and reorder for visits	Yes	Visits not supported	No	?
Statistics for visits are based on	Pages *****	Not supported	Pages *****	Pages *****
Statistics for unique visitors are based on	Pages *****	Not supported	Not supported	Pages *****
Report countries	From IP location or domain name	Domain name	Domain name	?
Report regions (US and Canada states)	Need Maxmind Regions database	No	No	No
Report cities and major countries regions	Need Maxmind Cities database	No	No	No
Report ISP	Need Maxmind ISP database	No	No	No
Report Organizations name	Need Maxmind Organizations database	No	No	No
Report hosts	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Report WhoIs informations on hosts	Yes	No	No	No
Report authenticated users	Yes	Yes	No	No
Report/Filter robots (nb detected)	Yes/Yes (403**)	Yes / Yes (8**)	No/No	No/No
Report/Filter worms (nb of families detected)	Yes/Yes (5)	No / No	No/No	No/No
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	Yes	Yes
Report exit pages	Yes	No	Yes	Yes
Not ordered records tolerance and reorder for entry/exit pages	Yes	Entry/Exit not supported	No	?
Detection of CGI pages as pages (and not just hits)	Yes	Only if prog ends by a defined value	Only if prog ends by a defined value	Yes
Report pages by directory	No	Yes	No	No
Report pages with last access time/average size	Yes/Yes	Yes/No	No/No	No/No
Dynamic filter on hosts/pages/referers report	Yes/Yes/Yes	No/No/No	No/No/No	No/No/No
Report web compression statistics (mod_gzip,mod_deflate)	Yes	No	No	No
Report file types	Yes	Yes	No	No
Report by file size	No	Yes	No	No
Report OS (nb detected)	Yes (46)	Yes (29)	No (0)	?
Report browsers (nb detected)	Yes (121*)	Yes (9*)	Yes (4*)	Yes (<20*)
Report details of browsers versions	Major and minor versions	Major versions by default, minor with SUBBROW option	Major an minor versions	Major and minor versions
Report screen sizes	Yes	No	No	Yes
Report tech supported by browser for Java/Flash/PDF	Yes/Yes/Yes	No/No/No	No/No/No	No/No/No
Report audio format supported by browser for Real/QuickTime/Mediaplayer	Yes/Yes/Yes	No/No/No	No/No/No	No/No/No
Report search engines used (nb detected)	Yes (122***)	Yes (24)	No (0)	Yes (<20 ***)
Report keywords/keyphrases used on search engines (nb detected)	Yes/Yes (118***)	Yes/No (29***)	No/Yes (14***)	Yes/No (<20***)
Report external refering web page with/without query	Yes/Yes	No/No	No/Yes	Yes/No
Report HTTP Errors	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Report 404 Errors	Nb + List last date/referer	Nb only	Nb only	No
Report 'Add to favorites' statistics	Yes	No	No	No
Other personalized reports for miscellanous/marketing purpose	Yes	No	No	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, cygwin Perl 5.8, Athlon 1Ghz)	5200****	39000****	12000****	NA No program to run
Benchmark with DNS lookup in lines/seconds (full features enabled, with XLF format, cygwin Perl 5.8, Athlon 1Ghz)	80****	80****	80****	NA No program to run
Analyzed data save format (to use with third tools)	Structured text file or XML	Text files with OUTPUT option	Flat text file	Not possible
Export statistics to PDF	Experimental	No	No	No
Graphical statistics in one page / several / or frames	Yes/Yes/Yes	Yes/No/No	Yes/Yes/No	No/Yes/Yes

* This number is not really the number of browsers detected. All browsers (known and unknown) can be detected by products that support user agent listing (AWStats,Analog,Webalizer,HitBox). The 'browser detection feature' and number is the number of known browsers for which different versions/ids of same browser are grouped by default in one browser name.

** AWStats can detect robots visits: All robots among the most common are detected, list is in robotslist.txt (250Kb). 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 submitted 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 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 (that's the 'number detected'). Those rules are updated with AWStats updates. But AWStats has also an algorithm to detect keywords of unknown search engines with unknown url syntax rules.

**** Most log analyzers have poor (or not at all) robots, search engines, os or browsers detection capabilities and less features (no or poor visits count, no filter rules, etc...).
It is not possible to add all AWStats features to other log analyzers, so don't forget that benchmarks results are for 'different features'. For this benchmark, I did just complete Webalizer and Analog robots or search engines databases with part of AWStats database. So Webalizer config file was completed with this file, Analog config file was completed with this file. Note that without this very light add (using default conf file), Webalizer speed is 3 times faster, Analog is 15% faster).
Benchmark was made on a combined (XLF/CLF) log record on an Athlon 1GHz.
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. Don't forget that DNS lookup is 95% (even with a lookup cache) of the time used by a log analyzer, so if your host is not already resolved in log file and DNS lookup is enable, the total time of the process will be nearly the same whatever is the speed of the log analyzer.

***** 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).