I have to frequently set environment variables to enable stats collection with python, perf and other testing. We could potentially make collection of statistics ON by default. We should also make the output for statistics JSON by default since we primarily use json format to visualize the statistics. This ticket will explore any side effects and fix them by making stats default for most testing. With perf testing there is also a matter of impact to the perf itself for collecting stats.

If it is not doable to a larger extent, we could at least make an option available for python tests to generate stats. It could be adding an option "--enable-statistics" to enable stats through the runner script. This option might only go together with --preserve that prevents database directory from being deleted, but that will be okay.