Change to save the IP data periodically instead of immediately every time a player connects. This should reduce the timings impact to large servers. By default, the data is saved at 1 minute intervals; this can be changed with a new config option 'saveinterval', which specifies the time period between saves in minutes. Of course, if no one has connected in the past minute, no data is written. The old behavior (immediate writes) can be selected by setting saveinterval to 0.
This change also updates the bStats metrics to version 1.7.