How long does the Matomo archiving process take for high traffic websites – or hundreds of websites?

When auto-archiving is enabled, Matomo will process raw tracking data every night (as a default) and aggregate reports for daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly periods. This ensures dashboards and API requests load quickly.

What affects archiving duration

While Matomo continues to receive performance improvements, the archiving duration will always scale with data volume and configuration. The archiving process varies based on traffic volume, the number of websites, report complexity, use of segments, and server resources. As data volume grows, archiving may take longer.

For small to medium traffic sites, the archiving process often completes within minutes. For high-traffic installations or setups with extensive segmentation, the archiving duration can take considerably longer and may run for hours.

If you want to achieve optimal performance at scale, review the On-Premise server requirements and scalable setup guides. These resources explain how to size your infrastructure and tune archiving for high-traffic use cases.

Change the archiving schedule for high traffic sites

Because the archiving duration scales with data volume, the archiving frequency also depends on your setup and server performance. If archiving runs for an hour or more, the cron schedule should be adjusted to run less frequently. Read more on the recommended archiving frequency.

Archiving considerations

Real-world Matomo installations use a range of architectures. From well-tuned single-server setups to multi-server environments with dedicated archiving, database replication, and queued tracking. While powerful single servers can handle significant traffic, users often reach scaling limits without architectural separation.

For high-traffic sites or complex reporting, separate archiving and database workloads. Additionally, use Queued Tracking with Redis to improve stability and performance.

Share your archiving experience

If you manage a medium or high traffic Matomo instance, we welcome feedback on your archiving process experience. Details like traffic volume, website count, segment usage, server specifications, and archiving duration can help other users configure their setups. You can share this information by sending an email to Matomo Support.