Is Google Analytics Having Trouble Keeping Up?

Since I started this blog, I have been using Google Analytics to measure traffic to the site. In general, its a fabulous service and works really well, until recently.

I've noticed that in the past month or so, Google Analytics seems to have trouble keeping up with the traffic. I've noticed that the numbers reported are lower than expected and stay that way for 1-2 days and then as presumably the engine crawls through the right logs in queue, it catches up.

One way to tell for sure whether you're having a similar problem is compare your Google Analytics numbers to your Ad Sense numbers. Ad Sense seems to be more accurate and is updated in real time. Google Analytics is queue based and so tends to need some time to catch up. I've found in recent days that Ad Sense gives me a better indication of short term stats than Analytics.

For my blog, this is not a huge problem. But this is yet again a mark against the "software as a service" model - would you want to trust your corporate infrastructure to a queue in the cloud that can get bogged down because of an influx of unexpected growth?