I was told that stats is more efficent and better supported with MapReduce... is that true and if so why?
The two don't do the same thing.
stats
usually does less, so it'll be faster than transaction
which is doing more work. For example, transaction
will build multi-value fields for you while stats
only builds those fields you specify.
As for using MapReduce more efficiently, grouping events together with transaction
requires knowing all the events in one place - the search head. stats
has less complex features - e.g. no maxspan
, maxpause
, non-unique identifiers - that allow a lot of work to be done on the indexers.
To sum up, if stats
does what you need then it'll be faster almost every time.