Why Dynamic Rewrites are a bad idea.

I'm seeing more and more people going after dynamic search engine friendly url's. Which most all solutions i've seen utilize apache's mod_rewrite.

Dynamic rewrites of pages just adds even more overhead to your pages. From most of the sites I've been working on recently have very high number of concurrent customers browsing at one time, such a solution wouldn't be worth my time as it would merely add more loading time for the customer's, and ultimately costing the store owner a sell.

Think about 10k concurrent users, hitting MySQL/PHP constantly, vs a static snapshot of the same page the HTML catalog generates. I believe X-Cart has the right approach, as it not only makes SEO friendly pages but also takes a huge load off your server. Best viable solution is a HTML catalog generation nightly during off peak hours, and forcing the customer to the HTML pages as much as often. Most will argue that since the HTML is static theres no way to inject dynamic based content, i.e. the Mini Cart, Authentication area, etc. The solution: AJAX :)

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