Tips for high-volume sites

The following are some tips for high-load sites that are using the XML sitemap module (2.x version).

• Enable the following options in admin/settings/xmlsitemap:
  • Minimum sitemap lifetime: 1 day (or higher/less frequent). The module is smart enough to only update the cache files only if the sitemap data has changed. But if you have a site that changes often, the sitemap may be rebuilt every time cron is run. Since generating the sitemap files is very expensive operation, and since search engines only request your site's sitemap.xml every so often, it is best to change this setting to 1 day or higher.
• Enable some mod_rewrite rules to avoid a full Drupal bootstrap.