Tuesday was spent looking at the baroque set of mod_rewrite rules on the intranet’s Apache server. The module is a wonderful thing, but the more rules to apply, the greater the load on the server.
I’m using mod_rewrite to turn
http://www.example.org/some/path.html
into
http://www.example.org/handler/display.cgi?path=/some/path.html
That’s an easy enough rewrite rule, but even if you apply [L] to stop applying rewrite rules, the server’s going to attempt to rewrite the rewritten URL, so you have to write defensive rules.
Unless, and why didn’t it dawn on me sooner, you create an alias for /handler. Then the rewritten URL is out of the scope of the rewrite rules.
