WordPress stats: OWA plugin overhead in the future

I hadn’t used this specific solution, but any self-hosted analytics in general should be considered potentially huge resource hog:

  • every async action in WordPress is effectively another WP core load, so if tracking code makes even one additional async request to back-end it effectively doubles the load;

  • stat logging by nature cannot be cached;

  • stat logging by nature needs database writes, which are much more performance-hungry than reads.

Hosted analytics solution are popular exactly because analytics comes with performance challenges.