More efficient default .htaccess rules

[g1smd]

Potential three fold performance increase in rewrite processing, simply by restricting which URL requests result in very inefficient -f and -d "exists" checks being invoked. These checks never need to be invoked for image or stylesheet requests.

Discussed at: ​http://wordpress.org/support/topic/more-efficient-rewrite-rules

[g1smd]

Patch for wp-includes/rewrite.php file

[sivel]

See #11884

Per the decision from that ticket I am suggesting that this be closed as wontfix.

[g1smd]

Without the restrictions added by this patch, the standard WP code literally beats the server hard drive to death. The typical serving of a single "page" invokes at least several dozen very slow and inefficient "exists" checks: two for every object (image, stylesheet, etc) so requested. These checks for disk-based-resources happen for URL requests that were never going to be rewritten to the index.php script anyway. In that case, the checks are not needed, and should be avoided. Without the proposed changes, medium and high traffic sites will have to purchase an early server upgrade.

[scribu]

The second part of your proposal seems to be already addressed in #11845.

So I'm just going to close this as a dup of #11884.

Feel free to continue the discussion there.

[g1smd]

Closed?

Looks like I wasted an evening here.

[nacin]

I like the idea, but how many plugins would it break?

[g1smd]

That depends on whether the index.php file directly serves images and stylesheets.

[scribu]

@nacin: ​http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/11884#comment:8