Performance impact of 100+ SSI directives

[Maxim Khitrov]

Hi everyone,

I'm trying to refactor a website composed entirely of static files.
Part of the content is a long list of scientific publication
references (> 100), which are all listed on a common publications
page, and also repeated on other project-specific pages.

I'm considering placing each reference (1 line of text) into a
separate file and using SSI directives to include those files as
needed throughout the site. The reason for doing this is that the
references are not static. The publications go through several stages
(under review, in press, published), which are reflected in the
references. On top of that, we occasionally need to make formatting
changes and it's a bit problematic trying to remember all the
different places where a reference is used.

The question is how would nginx deal with more than 100 or even 200
include directives on a single page? This setup would make my job of
updating the references easier, but if there is a significant impact
on the time it takes to serve the publications list, then I would
rather write some search/replace shell scripts to handle the updates.

Any other suggestions are welcome, but databases and server-side
coding are not an option :)

- Max