Question

I have a special setup where I serve content purely through a static XML file the content on my blog. A plugin creates the static XML every time a new blog post is published in

/wp-content/folder/my.xml

Great. Now I redirect my users that would normally come via the RSS feed url to this static file via .htaccess:

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
# Rewrite feed/ to Static Feed:
RewriteRule ^feed/?$ /wp-content/folder/my.xml [L,T=application/rss+xml]
</IfModule>
# END WordPress

This all works great, it seems – however looking at MySQL it’s under really heavy load from the number of users my server is getting. This is odd as all it’s in theory doing is serving a static XML to them. Looking at the processes in phpmyadmin I see lots of:

SELECT SQL_CALC_FOUND_ROWS  wp_posts.* FROM wp_posts  WHERE 1=1  AND wp_posts.post_type = 'post' AND ...

Which suggests every request for /feed/? is making MySQL activity… why ??

Any ideas?

Answer 1

I believe you’re missing a / at the beginning of your regex, or a RewriteBase / declaration above it.

---

Try changing your rewrite rule like so:

RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^(feed/?)?$ /wp-content/folder/my.xml [L,T=application/rss+xml]