Performance difference between if(!-e) and try_files?

Server NGINX
1

I am trying to generate a following in getting a small modification
added to Drupal that would allow it to work with try_files, as it
doesn’t right now (full explanation here:
nginx and Drupal | Drupal.org)

I am wondering though, exactly how many syscalls or savings per
request you get from using try_files instead of if (!-e
$request_filename) ? It would be interesting to be able to reference
some numbers, and I don’t trust my debugging skills to get it right.
Igor, you probably know how many each one makes in your sleep… :slight_smile:
would you have any ideas?

2

FWIW, we ran with “if (!-e…)” for about 2.5 years, filling up our
error.log files with useless messages in the operation of that scheme.
It
help hide a number of problems that were not see because the volume of
messages was so high.

By using try_files, we were able to substantially clean up our
implementation, and find and fix a number of problems.

We have not measured performance with this change, but just the fact
that
you don’t make a log file entry in the error.log is probably a win in
and of
itself, I would think.

-peter

3

On Wed, Jul 14, 2010 at 8:04 PM, Peter Portante
[email protected] wrote:

We have not measured performance with this change, but just the fact that
you don’t make a log file entry in the error.log is probably a win in and of
itself, I would think.

I try to use it wherever possible as Igor recommends it but right now
Drupal doesn’t cooperate. That’s why I am hoping to push this change
forward in Drupal. I thought it would be interesting to know
internally how much is saved. Logfile pollution / possible error
string concatenation is a nice bonus (I know PHP’s internal error
logging concatenates the error string and that’s why it is good to
never have anything - even notice/info/etc. as it starts degrading
performance on some level)