I like to keep my websites extremely light and fast, but of course I need some kind of user tracking and analytics.
It seems like Google Analytics always takes significant enough processing time that I'd like to replace it with something faster (and/or hosted locally), perhaps having less features.
I really only care about these metrics: browser, OS, referrer, and # hits per page on a given day or week.
Does anyone have any good suggestions, or is Google Analytics really the best option?
It may be the load time that is the main delay. Try hosting the google analytics javascript file locally.