Issue
I've been doing further research about permanent 301 re-directs.
I'm doing a site re-design and 4,000 pages are changing their URLs so I have a few thousand 301 re-direct statements where the URLs are changing so much that I can't do regular expressions.
I've been researching about the performance differences between putting them in a .htaccess file or in httpd.conf. I'm reading and getting conflicting information about the benefits of each.
i.e. this which sounds promising:
"Note, if you are using Apache then it's strongly recommended to put the redirect rules in your httpd.conf (stored in memory when Apache starts) and not .htaccess files (which are loaded on every page request)." Source - Major site rewrite and SEO with 301 redirects
but then conflicted by this:
"You can use Include directive in httpd.conf to be able to maintain redirects in another file. But it would not be very efficient, as every request would need to be checked against a lot of regular expressions. " Source - http://www.faqoverflow.com/serverfault/414225.html
My host said: "No performance impact with httpd.conf, you're in effect doing the same thing as adding them to the config itself. But you are doing so in a way that will not cause issues with it or have the changes lost."
Is it correct that adding thousands of 301 re-direct statements to httpd.conf won't cause performance issues for my site?
Solution
Is it correct that adding thousands of 301 re-direct statements to httpd.conf won't cause performance issues for my site?
Thousands of redirects are fine. I've heard or people attempting to do benchmarks on stuff like there's practically no significant impact, anymore so than regular stuff your server's OS does.
Your second quote is flat out wrong, at least as far as apache 2.2-2.4 is concerned. When you use the Include directive, it loads the contents of the file(s) as part of the server's configuration. That means it's loaded when you start the server, or when you explicitly tell apache to reload its configuration. It does not look at all the Included files for every request.
Apache uses this directive pretty liberally, as in most out-of-the-box configurations use Include to load entire directories of per-module configuration and per-vhost configuration.
Answered By - Jon Lin Answer Checked By - Clifford M. (WPSolving Volunteer)