Is the "Count content views" settings related to the "Discard access logs older than" option? My question is related with statistics module to know the "most popular" content.

I have enabled the Statistics module (Core Drupal). As you already know, to get this statistics is necessary enable the option "Count content views" in "Access log settings"; also, in "Access log settings," I saw the option, "Discard access logs older than" necessary to set time to log statistics. 

According to your experience, are these statistics related with the interval of time indicated in the "Discard access logs older than" option, or are statistics of all "content views" since that statistics module was enabled?

According the code of statistics.module (line 54), the behavior expected is only add one value per visit, and nothing about use an interval of time to calculate some value; but in the "Access log settings" page it seems that this interval of time is related with the option "Discard access logs older than." Are the most popular articles tied to this interval of time?
According my review, I confirm that "Most popular" default statistics (Drupal 6), give the "most popular" "al time" since "Count content views" option was enabled.

So, I reviewed several modules like Statspro, Visitors, Quickstats, Reports and Radioactivity, and I chose Radioactivity to solve this. Radioactivity give results, per day, very close to Analytics.