[drupal-devel] url aliases

[Gerhard Killesreiter]

Hi there!

The pathauto module has recently become popular. It introduces path
aliases for a lot of urls and exposes a performance issue with Drupal's
handling of url_aliases.

There are two things that need investigation:

- wouldn't using conf_url_rewrite be cheaper in some of this cases?
- why do we load all patch aliases for each and every page load?

It is probably not the sql query SELECT * FROM {url_alias} that is the
problem, but the processing in php afterwards (looping over the
results). This happens in drupal_get_path_map(). Is there any reason why
we couldn't only select the alias we need? Currently, we need all the
aliases because we want to make sure they can be used when creating
links on the generated page.

Wouldn't it be possible to

1) during processing collect all the urls that are going to be on a page
and
2) only retreive the needed aliases based on this info?

Cheers,
	Gerhard