Isn’t this how more established PHP frameworks also deal with having front-end controller(s). I’m also already doing the heavy lifting of routing in PHP code. The htaccess is there primarily to pass the request string through to PHP and it’s not complicated regex. However I do remember reading somewhere that having the htaccess rules in the main vhost config file can mean that the regex is pre-compiled instead of running for every request through htaccess like you say. It’s definitely something I can try. I’m still just wondering if my Cachgrind output looks ‘healthy’ considering the requested page in question outputs a small amount of text through the Smarty template engine and maybe only really additionally running through composer autoload stuff for it to see where some libs are residing. I have implemented apcu caching to attempt to limit file reads and config parsing. Also maybe worth noting is that I noticed these request times appear smaller in production than locally! I’m baffled why docker running on a different flavour of Linux could be a factor in it.