ergophobe - 2:03 am on Nov 6, 2012 (gmt 0)

It is vital that you have a clear idea about the differences between URLs "out there" on the web and files and paths "here" inside the server

It always amazes me how well TBL had thought this stuff out by 1996, and how widely ignored it is 16 years later! The Axiom of Opacity is fundamental.

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.

Thanks so much! I didn't know this had been fixed. It persisted for years in WP. Glad to hear I can take it off my list of concerns.

It's too late to edit my original post, but hopefully everyone who reads it will read on to your link.

if you have 1000 images on a page, then doing 1000 file checks... didn't notice a difference.

Honestly, I think to notice a difference, you would need to be i/o constrained. If you have low traffic or you're CPU constrained, I think it would be rare to see much of a difference. But if you have lots of concurrent users reading and perhaps even writing files (e.g. image uploads or simply writing comments to the DB in a setup where the DB server and web server are on the same disk), you might start to see something there.