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I have the following:

RewriteRule ([a-zA-Z0-9]{5})?/load_page/([0-9]+)

Which arrangement would be optimal for the regex:

RewriteRule ^/([a-zA-Z0-9]{5})?/load_page/([0-9]+)

OR

RewriteRule ^/load_page/([a-zA-Z0-9]{5})?/([0-9]+)

OR

RewriteRule ^/([a-zA-Z0-9]{5})?/([0-9]+)/load_page

Thank you

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I don't think in your case there's a notable difference.

Want to be sure? Benchmark all of them with Apache Benchmark, Siege, JMeter or whatever benchmarking tool you want to use or are familiar with.

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Janne is likely right that the difference is negligible and that you should not optimize without benchmarking.

To answer the question anyway, it should depend on what URLs are requested. I would guess that most URLs requested don't have a path that starts with /load_page. In that case, it's likely that the regexp starting with ^/load_page will be slightly faster because it can rule out many non-matching strings quickly by comparing the first few characters and not having to backtrack. So if you request /foo, it will compare the f to l, see a mismatch and bail after comparing one or two characters.

With the other regexps, it would see /foo and think "I'm seeing some fine alphanumerics" and only abort after realizing that the rest of the regexp doesn't match.

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  • That's what I was thinking, but wasn't sure if the URLs are matched left-to-right or right-to-left or if another algorithm is used. Probably best way to go would be to benchmark them
    – Catalin
    Jul 19, 2011 at 12:21
  • What little experience I have of implementing regexp engines, it was left-to-right.
    – Henrik N
    Jul 19, 2011 at 14:25

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