Best way to set up Wordpress Permalinks

I've got two questions here that hopefully someone can address who has some knowledge of both SEO and Apache as well as Wordpress.

(1) How bad is using category/postname for Wordpress permalinks?

I've read that using the category/postname or tag/postname or even the postname/ permalink is terrible for server performance. I've read about I've read all the recommendations about using numbers at the beginning of permalinks (year/month/postname) because it's easier to match numbers than posts, especially if of a certain sequence. Supposedly much easier on the server for URL rewriting, got it.

But here's my problem. There is no way I can use an ad server for categories unless a category or tag is in the URL. The alternative is to then use a plugin which determines the category and serves ads for that category, causing even more overhead and work for the server. So I'd prefer to have my URLs be:

/cars/myarticle-postname-here/
/buildings/myarticle-postname/

(2) Using a plugin or tag to handle permalinks

Next is which to use. Nested categories don't work well for URLs - way too long. I just want cars, trucks, bikes, buildings etc. - whatever is the main category area. Subcategories like cars/audi and cars/porsche are great for the user to navigate but completely unnecessary in the URL. cars/postname is fine. There are two solutions I can see:

1) /tag/postname/ in the permalink. You have to hack in the code to make it work even though this solution is in the codex. Apparently it was left out in version 3.0 by accident I think.

2) Use an amazing plugin that works so well.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/search.php?q=scategory&sort=

These plugins work well and it would make sense if you could just set the permalink for each category to be what you want it to be like this is! I worry about (a) server load, and (b) potential incompatibility down the line. Each post Wordpress has to determine what is the primary URL to be used for a category. I'm wondering whether this is further causing problems but it is something that Wordpress should have enabled a long time ago - non-nested categories as a choice in URL structure.

Thoughts anyone?

 

I use category/postname and with some servers it does take a lot of memory.
install WP Cache and that should solve the problem

 

Thanks - good to know. I'll have at least 600-800 articles by end of year and need the structure of primarycategory/postname for it to work properly with the ad server. I keep hearing about the SEO issue with htaccess since it has to do a looking on hundreds of pages each time. Is this an issue? Caching to me seems more of a speed issue to retrieve the page but lookup issues might still be there.

 

The best is maybe to play around... create some dummy pages and categories and see what different settings will do for you. you can always go back...

 

A few pages will not have any appreciable effect. It's when you get to 200 when you start to see something.

 

/%category%/%postname%/

Matt Cutts uses /%postname%/ but not sure there's a reason for it.

 

Thanks for the input. I may do the same, despite the fact my permalinks will be too long (70-90 characters.) Messing with the plugin seems difficult. What I really don't like about Wordpress is that it determines the permalink by using the lowest ID number if the article is in multiple categories, e.g. cars, style categories. It is not user definable. Oh well... Time for a lot of 301s, lol.