Awstats will consider as a page hit any entry from the log it processes. By default some file extensions (for regular image types and css/js) are excluded from what awstats will consider as a page:
NotPageList="css js class gif jpg jpeg png bmp ico"(this is the default). All other file types will be counted as pages. Now, if we want to completely ignore some files, or even all the content of one folder from the awstats processing we can use the SkipFiles parameter. We might want to do this to ignore some frames, hidden pages, ajax calls, etc.

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Whatever web log analyzer you would use, at one time or the other you will end up with one problem: how to deal with weblogs rotation, to not have a gap in your statistics? This has various solutions starting with running the weblog analyzer at the prerotate step of logrotate, or maybe using some manual script.
This post will show how you can rotate the apache logs using awstats right after it has processed the logs. This can be beneficial for situations where you have quite big logs and using this method will keep them small all the time, and also where restarting apache just for logrotating is not such a good idea. Obviously for this to make sense, you need to be already using awstats for your log processing .

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Awstats is probably the best open source web stat program available (with other projects like webalizer and analog, no longer being maintained). Besides many security problems that are found all the time in Awstats, the main problem that bothered me is its speed. Awstats is written in perl, and this means that it will be considerably slower than a similar program written in C for example (like webalizer for example). There is not much we can do to speed awstats, but on high traffic sites (with logs growing over a few Gigs of data per day) this can be a real problem…

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