Re: [cobalt-developers] Webalizer - Country Analysis help

[Sean Pecor <sean@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Friday 03 November 2000 02:11, you wrote:
> > # HostnameLookups: Log the names of clients or just their IP numbers
> > #   e.g.   www.apache.org (on) or 204.62.129.132 (off)
> This will cause a dns lookup everytime "hits" your server. 

Well, not actually. Once an IP address is resolved for a given session it is 
cached by Apache. So, if Mike from 192.32.82.193 visits your home page, 
Apache resolves it to "mike.blah.com" once and only once for his session. If 
you've got a T1 or better connection, you're talking about an 80ms (0.08 
second) delay before Apache writes the first log entry for each new visitor. 
On a machine getting 10 new visitors per second, this could be a problem. On 
a machine with 5 new visitors per second it might not be an issue at all. 

If you compile your Webalizer scripts on demand then having Webalizer do DNS 
lookups could be a real drag because of the wait. If you batch script 
Webalizer nightly then you'll never notice the slowdown. Webalizer might be 
saturating your bandwidth with DNS lookups for a few minutes though ;).

Another issue, if I may continue my rant, is that domain names do not give 
accurate measures of which users are coming from which region of the world. A 
.net address could be serving dialup users in Prague. A .com address could be 
a company in Canada. And so on.

Another issue I have with Webalizer is that, like most other log scripts 
(Analog, etc.), you're given "hits" instead of "sessions". Well, what if your 
web server is SLOW for Australia, so your "hits" are low compared with other 
countries. With Webalizer, you're given the impression that there aren't many 
people from Australia hitting your web site, when in fact there are lots but 
their average hits per session is lowe because your web site is so slow (hit 
one or two pages then they leave, compared with the median average of 20 
pages per session). 

Sean.

-- 
Digital Spinner, Inc.
802.948.2020
sean@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx