I mean, I thought it was long dead. It’s twenty-five years old, and the web has changed quite a bit in that time. No one uses Perl anymore, for starters. I used Open Web Analytics, Webalizer, or somesuch by 2008 or so. I remember Webalizer being snappy as heck.

I tinkered with log analysis myself back then, peeping into the source of AWStats and others. Learned that a humongous regexp with like two hundred alternative matches for the user-agent string was way faster than trying to match them individually — which of course makes sense seeing as regexps work as state-machines in sort of a bytecode close to machine code. My first attempts, in comparison, were laughably naive and slow. Ah, what a time.