Pretty Permalinks - Wordpress - Server load
 

How do you guys deal with pretty permalinks on high traffic wordpress sites? It seems the load on my server goes up quite a bit due to the:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f

rule you have to put in htaccess.

Any tips?

Define "high traffic". I have some WP sites that get substantial traffic and pretty links has never really been an issue for me. Have you tried installing New Relic or another type of monitoring to see what queries are slowing down your site?

About 100k / day.

and no, I have not. Shall look into it.

R U sure that this is the problem?
It can be quite a few things that can slow down a WP site...

That coffee wouldn't give you issues. What is giving you issues is the logging being done. Go into settings and stop it from counting clicks, etc.

Sites load fine without permalinks. Switched them on to 2 sites and server load increased with 20%

Yeah, but when you disable permalinks most of visitors that should land on perma link will actually get 404 or something... And that way most WP post specific functions won't be executed and load will lower.

I would check other stuff like mysql loads, php loads etc...

Here is what my host support says is the issue:

In the .htaccess it has.

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d

-f = file
-d = directory

The -f is the problem. It means it's processing the rules for every "file", meaning every thumbnail, etc. If it was just directories it would not be so bad, but with your traffic amount this rule is sending thousands of calls to the CPU per second.

So, question is. Is there a solution for this?

This is how things work... This is normal... The only solution is to change the host or to try and figure what is the problem (this clearly isn't since this is probably less than 0.1% cpu power needed to serve one wp page).

hm, ok. Thanks for the reply. Maybe its because I'm using an old WP theme

Theme is usually not that problem (but it can be)... Usually it's the plugins...

Do you have a lot of pretty links set? Maybe you could just manually 301 redirect them via htaccess instead of using the plugin.

nope, don't use the pretty links plugin

Putting those thumbs on CDN should help reduce server load if you don't want to part ways with pretty links. Let me know if you want more information on CDN, we have some great options for all budgets.