...
| bin span=1s _time
| stats count by _time
| stats max(count) as "winner winner chicken dinner"
That's probably your basic need right there. Change "span=..." to whatever you need. 'count' is probably what you want to use for the counts, but the peak rates - you don't tell us how those even might be calculated. It might be "max(fieldname)" or something else.
Note, I think by second probably isn't gonna be a very fast thing to do over a longer period of time. There are 86,400 if those it'll calculate every day...
Report acceleration may help, and/or building a data model and accelerating that. Or using tstats if they're indexed fields you are fiddling with. Lastly, this might actually be a good use for using a summary index.
All of those things are easily able to be found with a search of (using google syntax, but I think most search engines follow that?) 'Splunk report acceleration site:docs.splunk.com' (obviously, change the keywords in there).
Happy Splunking,
Rich
