performance of ProxyPass vs rewrite

[Xavier Noria <fxn@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

In an Apache + mod_proxy_balancer setup you can base the dispatch on  
ProxyPass or on "rewrite to the balancer unless the file exists".  
That is

  ProxyPass /images      !
  ProxyPass /stylesheets !
  ProxyPass /javascripts !
  ...
  ProxyPass / balancer://cluster/
  ProxyPassReverse / balancer://cluster/

versus

  RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}%{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
  RewriteRule ^/(.*)$ balancer://cluster%{REQUEST_URI} [P,QSA,L]

I've read the ProxyPass approach has the pro of avoiding a stat call.  
But the number of dynamic requests is proportionally quite small in  
the websites I work in, since a regular page normally means a request  
for the application server (Mongrel in my case) and a handful of  
requests for static resources. So I wonder whether that's really a  
pro in practice.

On the other hand, you need to remember to have httpd.conf and public  
subdirectories in sync, and you can't have dynamic and static  
requests behind, say, /images. The configuration based on mod_rewrite  
is more orthogonal in that sense.

Does anybody have compared the performance of both approaches?

-- fxn


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