Efficient 301 redirects in Apache (www to non-www and vice-versa)?

Question

I came across an article titled "Efficient 301 Redirects."

For example, if you are trying to redirect your site from www to non-www domain, the article suggests that when compared to this .htaccess/httpd.conf rule:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
  RewriteEngine On
  RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.domainname\.com$ [NC]
  RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://domainname.com/$1 [R=301,L]
</IfModule>

this would be a more efficient 301 redirect (although only slightly):

<IfModule mod_alias.c>
  Redirect permanent / http://domainname.com/
</IfModule>

Question: Is the latter rule really efficient (even slightly)?

Indeed. However, I'm unsure why you can't simply add the second rule after enabling mod_alias. — Pothi Kalimuthu, Sep 22 '13 at 02:16

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Sep 23 '13 at 06:55

2

to answer your question: yes, it is, and the article also states why:

... by using Redirect directive of Apache and return directive of Nginx, we can effectively avoid doing any capturing or matching at all and thus we can completely avoid evaluation of a regular expression.

it's about simply skipping some steps of evaluation.

i'd like to see perftest against this solution/tweaks

answered Sep 23 '13 at 06:55

that guy from over there

1,355
10
11

2

I don't know about specific performance benchmarks... But the apache folks make the recommended (redirect > rewrite) approach quite clear: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/rewrite/avoid.html#redirect – Daniel Widrick Sep 23 '13 at 07:53

Efficient 301 redirects in Apache (www to non-www and vice-versa)?

1 Answers1