mod-rewrite and server loads

[specvision]

I'm rather ignorant of how Apache works so I'm wondering if using mod rewrite for SEO friendly URL's add significantly to server overhead. For example, Joomla has various search engine friendly url mods that rely on mod rewrite. Would that take a lot of extra resources or not enough to matter?

Basically I'm looking to rework my site to incorporate a CMS. I already have phpBB and Coppermine generating dynamic pages, then if I add Joomla there's a lot more, and if mod-rewrite adds yet more demands...well, I don't want to become this big resource hog and get in trouble!

Thanks.

[Ron]

I'd say that compared to running phpBB and Coppermine (and presumably Joomla) the load that mod_rewrite adds to your site's resource requirements is completely negligible.

But that's just a SWAG

[Vin DSL]

I concur!

[Ron]

:thud:

[Ron]

[jason]

I manage the web hosting environment for a mid-size university and, because of the way our environment is set up EVERY request to our server goes through a rewrite. We have a redirect file that is about 1,000 lines long (which I recently chopped down from about 3,000 lines by removing all of the redirects that resulted in errors) that contains all of the special URLs that people ask us to create for special events and such and a series of RewriteMap files that map assigned URL's to their Unix accounts. We serve up about half- to three-quarters of a million page views a day on our three-machine server farm and this doesn't register as a blip on our server load.

--Jason

[Gwaihir]

Joomla has various search engine friendly url mods that rely on mod rewrite. Would that take a lot of extra resources or not enough to matter?

I haven't actually looked at any of those Joomla ones, however those tools I have seen for rewriting + a php based CMS don't stress mod rewrite at all. Usually there's just one rule: send whatever request you get for a page in the CMS on to index.php and let php figure it out.

That makes the question: do the user friendly urls stress the php interpreter? Nope, not really either. It hardly matters whether it comes in as /article/5000 or as ?type=article&id=5000. I haven't benchmarked it, but I'm confident it's nothing compared to the hard work the CMS has to do beyond that point (getting the right stuff from the database and making it into a nice html page for your user).

[specvision]

Thanks a lot everyone!