Do The Smart URL Feature Affect Performance?

[WhoIsShe]

Hello,

On my forum, traffic has been increasing a lot recently and I'm looking for ways to optimize the forum further so I can accomodate much more traffic without having to purchase a server upgrade.

I use URL rewriting and I'm wondering if I can speed up the forum by manually rewriting the urls where appropriate and turning off the function which currently first buffers the entire page and then runs the regex search and replace on it to handle the SE friendly urls.

Do you think this would make an appreciable difference in the performance of the forum?  I know it might take several hours to go through the code and get it right, so I want to learn your opinions before trying it out.

Thanks.  I use SMF 1.0.5.

[Ben_S]

I wouldn't have thought it would affect performance much. Certainly when I disabled it on my board - think it's a pointless feature - I never noticed the load drop.

[WhoIsShe]

It's not a pointless feautre - Google likes it very much - but it's implemented as an afterthought.

[Ben_S]

Google doesn't really care all that much about it if you ask me.

[WhoIsShe]

If your forum, like Simplemachines, has an enormous pagerank, then of course you won't notice the difference.

Anyway, I'm very close to getting a 100% rewrite free forum with smart URLs.  I doubt that it will have any significant effect on performance, but what is done is done!