[UPHPU] .htaccess performance hit

[Joseph Scott]

On May 7, 2008, at 3:08 PM, Wade Preston Shearer wrote:

> I have been told that using .htaccess files (specifically, mod  
> rewrites in .htaccess files) can have a significant negative impact  
> on performance. Is this .htaccess use period or just  
> heavy .htaccess use? Meaning, is there a difference between one  
> rewrite in an .htaccess file over two hundred? Note that I am not  
> asking about the effect on performance with rewrites in general,  
> just the use of .htaccess files. Will reducing the contents of  
> an .htaccess file help or will I have to disable .htaccess use  
> altogether to see any change? It seems to me that you would have to  
> disabled .htaccess use entirely in order to see a performance  
> increase since Apache would have to still traverse the web tree  
> checking for .htaccess files even if they don't exist or even if  
> they are light. Will moving all of my rewrites into httpd.conf and  
> leaving .htaccess use enabled so that I can toss a quite rule in  
> once in a while without having to restart Apache negate the  
> performance improvement that I am seeking?

I believe your hunch is correct, the biggest impact probably comes  
form having .htaccess support enabled at all.  I don't know how much  
a penalty that really involves though.  If you aren't maxing out the  
disk I/O on the web server I suspect that the performance hit for  
enabling .htaccess files is probably small.

Since developers often only have access to change an .htaccess file  
and not the Apache config file we usually just bite the bullet and  
use the .htaccess files.

--
Joseph Scott
joseph at randomnetworks.com
http://joseph.randomnetworks.com/