Is there an issue with this .htaccess which would really slow down a page request?

Question

Since adding this basic .htaccess to my index directory, each page load slows down by maybe 20-30 seconds:

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on

RewriteRule ^(.+)-(.+) movie.php?id=$1 [NC]

Is there some malformation or bad regex formatting here? I can't see anything wrong with it.

Thanks!

As an update, just these 2 lines are enough to put the slow down on:

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on

Answer 1

Even though I think that 20-30 seconds is a little bit far-fetched, here some concerns about your current regex:

• Part of your regex isn't required, so drop it. Especially if this part already looks like a lot of backtracking (and (.+) does). Thus you may reduce the regex to ^(.+)-.
• You are matching an ID with (.+). That isn't the optimal approach. Better use ([^-]+) instead. This will mach any char that isn't an - (and that's what you want.)

The resulting Rule thus is:

RewriteRule ^([^-]+)- movie.php?id=$1 [NC]

Even better (this allows only integral IDs):

RewriteRule ^([0-9]+)- movie.php?id=$1 [NC]

Answer 2

It looks like you're running requests through your movie script. So how long does it take your movie.php script to run? If it takes 20-30 seconds, well, then there you go!

Answer 3

Turn on rewrite logging and crank the level up, see what your RewriteRule is doing:

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mod/mod_rewrite.html#rewritelog
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mod/mod_rewrite.html#rewriteloglevel

If the regex is having to work overtime, you'll quickly see Apache's error log explode in size, especially at the higher levels of rewrite logging.