Mambo/Joomla, over 1,000 content - Which SEF to use?

I use Mambo/Joomla for one of my sites. This site has over 1,000 content articles and I get problems with SEF (seach engine friendly URL).

I tried the open source ones (404SEF for example) but they can't handle the number of articles and slow down the site and server like crazzy.

The major problem is that each page URL is writen over and over adding a number at the end (/page_name_1.html) bringing the re-writes count is around 12,000! and this kills apache mod_rewrite .

My questions are:

Which kind of SEF component do you use?
How many articles/content the SEF has to deal with.

Thank you

 

I purchased SEF advance for 40Eur per domain and it works fine. No major load on the server, no duplicate urls.

The only problem, it hates punctuation in the title of content. I hates it so much that it stops working after few sql queries we removed all the 's and s' and it works.

Customer support by email works too in few hours we had several emails and the issue resolved.

 

Pierre: Did you notice much difference in your traffic levels after using SEF advanced?

 

Yes definitively, with the other SEF system as it slowed down the page load, we hade many visitors leaving inclompete page laod and according the stats the refresh rate dropped from 20% a day to 2% a day.

For me the 40Eur were worth it.