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Comment by muppetman | Hacker News Reader

You can do the same on a really high traffic Drupal site using the boost module. It's basically a module that will, for non-logged in users, generate a static html page and serve that instead. PHP isn't even called, the .htaccess just serves up the cached content.

And that's using Apache!

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That'll definitely give you a speed boost, as the interpreter doesn't have to get involved (if configured right). However, this article is talking about IO clogging apache workers. The issue is that the worker must do two jobs: generate the page (using mod_php) then send it to the client. Using nginx in front of apache means that nginx handles the IO to the client (which it is extremely good at), leaving the apache workers to handle nothing but generating pages, hence getting overall higher requests/sec from the same machine.

I've heard a lot of bad things about htaccess, is its slowness comparable to php over static, or apache over nginx?

htaccess is just a configuration file used by Apache to determine what should be served to whom.

.htaccess is read and parsed on every request. Putting the same directives in the server's virtual host config is a ton more efficient.

Me, I use php-fastcgi daemons with APC and nginx, with no Apaches. The speed bump and the drop in memory requirements were staggering. The main 'cost' is figuring out how to convert rewrite rules from one type to another, but if you're using a widely-known app, someone's already done it for you.

Which can slow things down, seems much less of a problem now than when I last dealt with them. There's a lot to read on using them to speed websites up.

Minus two for an on topic question?

The amount of slow-down is relative to what you actually write in the htaccess file. You can have two very different files that actually do the same thing.

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