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March 15, 2005

Track Traffic With Webalizer

The April 2005 issue of Linux Magazine has my Feature "Track Traffic With Webalizer - A Fast, Free and Feature-rich Log Analyzer", and it provides a decent overview of how to configure Webalizer. I have been using it for years on my own webserver, and after setting it up enough times on different systems, I asked my editor if he thought it would make a good article; he thought it would.

What I have also worked on, but haven't packaged up yet, is a much faster inverse DNS resolver for Webalizer. When processing webserver logs, many of us like to see the DNS names where traffic is coming from, but doing bulk lookups can be slow.

Webazolver spawns some user-given number of child processes to perform lookups one at a time, caching the results in a DB file for later use by webazolver. But this approach still limits the number of outstanding queries, and a few dead resolvers can really hang the process up.

I wrote a program that uses the excellent ADNS asynchronous resolver library, and in a single thread/process it's many, many times faster than the synchronous version.

I've really got to package and post it...

Posted by steve at March 15, 2005 04:28 PM

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Comments

Yes! I love webalizer and would love to try out Webazolver...

Posted by: Will Chatham at April 11, 2005 07:49 AM

I'd really love to try out your ADNS resolver with my webalizer. The majority of the time our webalizer spends processing is just waiting for dns results. Email me the information, if you'd like, or let me know somehow that you've posted it.

Posted by: Mac Newbold at August 3, 2005 12:01 PM