I am skeptical of those benchmarks. This is written in Python, and, looking at the core loop, yes, it really is Python, not Python wrapped around C or some other acceleration technology. For pure Python to come out appearing to get four times the through put of a C program is pretty dubious. That would have to be one crappy C program. GoAccess looks like it ought to be far enough along that somebody has at least taken a bit of a crack at optimization, but, perhaps not. C ought to be able to smoke pure Python at this task. (Possibly, you know, <i>unsafely</i>, where a crafted referrer may get to arbitrary code execution or something, but still it ought to be <i>way faster</i>.)