We have been aware for the past month that AWStats has been running very slow. On investigation we thought it could be something to do with the version of AWStats we were using so this was upgraded from 6.5 to 6.6 last week.

This had little effect on performance. We had a closer look at the data structure the control panel uses to store AWStats data, we discovered they use one folder to store all websites statistical data, the total files in this directory was 68,124. This is a rather large amount of files for one directory and explains the slow AWStats performance and heavy disk i/o activity.

To fix this we have placed each websites stats in a subdirectory of the main data folder, this has made a rather instant improvement to performance. AWStats now loads with very little delay.

Due to this discovery we have asked the control panel company and they have agreed to moving all statistical data to sub directories in the next update due at the end of this month.