smithaa02 - 12:03 am on Nov 6, 2012 (gmt 0)

Ergophone...fascinating stuff!

I did not know about about posts being faster than pages or that non-numeric urls had bloat issues.

I did some more research into the url convention issue. Apparently in WP 3.3 this was fixed ( [core.trac.wordpress.org...] )? WP 3.3 certainly did seem zippier than 3.2.

I turned on mysql logging and tested this for some test urls and I only got 30 requests per page (not bad). This site had lots of custom permalinks with the rewrite turned on and the 'custom permalinks' module activated. I certainly didn't see all the requests I had expected to based on one of those articles.

So hopefully (I could be wrong) but these issues are all fixed now as long as you have the latest wordpress?

I checked Jim's improved .htaccess code and it is intriguing. The logic is solid...if you have 1000 images on a page, then doing 1000 file checks on the server to see if those image exist is a waste and images (and other non-cms files should be excluded first).

Here is his code for WP which replaces the official reconsolidated code:

RewriteEngine on
#
# Unless you have set a different RewriteBase preceding this point,
# you may delete or comment-out the following RewriteBase directive
# RewriteBase /
#
# if this request is for "/" or has already been rewritten to WP
RewriteCond $1 ^(index\.php)?$ [OR]
# or if request is for image, css, or js file
RewriteCond $1 \.(gif¦jpg¦ico¦css¦js)$ [NC,OR]
# or if URL resolves to existing file
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -f [OR]
# or if URL resolves to existing directory
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -d
# then skip the rewrite to WP
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ - [S=1]
# else rewrite the request to WP
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
#
# END wordpress

I did try this however with a big WP site and honestly I didn't notice a difference. I ran an online speed test before and after and the changes didn't matter. I also monitored the load on the server and that didn't change either. Perhaps newer versions of apache have ways of caching 'if file exists' queries? I don't know, but in my case the result were inconsequential. Apparently, the WP team considered making Jim's code default, but were worried that you could then make things like dynamic images or dynamic files that ended in image extensions.

As for general performance, I have ooldes of WP sites on dedicated servers, and I don't experience performance issues (well I did before 3.3) so I hope we're not making mountains out of mole-hills. Deeper, if you're worried about performance you might ask your web hosting company for specs, their experience with wp and find out what your estimated traffic will be. If you control the server you can test it with benchmarks...but I would think you should be fine and if you get slammed you should be able to find a better server.

As for your specific question about index.php appearing or not appearing the url.

Basically, if you don't modify your .htaccess file you will be stuck with:

eg /index.php/url1/ or /index.php/url2/

If you have already installed the .haccess file, then you can do:

/url1/ or /url2/

If you install 'custom permalinks', you can then do:

/url1.html and url2.html