Awstats Cron Script

I hope this hasn't already been asked but...

I currently have awstats set up on two of my sites and with the crontab part, its set to update at 3AM and 3:15AM everyday. I was hoping to have it update a bit more often than that, but I'm afraid of possibly overloading the server or getting in trouble for somthing with the load it creates (I have no idea how resource heavy awstats is). Anyways, how often would be good to have the script update?

How often do you look at your stats? Most people find that once a day is fine, because you generally aren't comparing hour-to-hour statistics. Normally you would compare average use per day of the week (e.g. weekdays vs weekends) and then week vs week and month vs month to see what is driving traffic to/from your site. I guess it depends on what you plan to get out of using awstats.

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awstats seems to only parse the logs that haven't been compressed yet, which I gather happens once a day through logrotate. So if you only update awstats once, but it's not immediately before the log rotation, you'll miss a good fraction of your stats.

Any way around that? Is there a way to either:
a) Run awstats update right before logrotate
b) Keep two full days of uncompressed logs

Thanks.


--Noel

My experiences:
1. put all domains awstats command in one shell script such as aw.sh
2. use nice -n 15 /path/aw.sh in corn job

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