If you have a busy server(like me) that you host hlstats on, the daemons can get behind sometimes. For example I run 11 daemons across a ton of servers, and they can all display sort of slow in-game sometimes, even on an 8-core machine with light CPU load.
My solution so far for this is to set the perl.exe(s)(Windows) to realtime priority. This has resulted in instant response in-game for all servers.
Keep in mind you need a fast database too, watch your daemon to see how long it takes to flush player updates to database. If it takes long, you have other problems :/
In linux this is referred to as setting the "nice" value of the process. Maybe someone else can shed light on this if it is a problem on linux.
Good luck! Hope I helped
