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I know this question has been asked many times and I've researched it myself on Google as well but just can't come up with the answer I need.

My hosting company is NOT letting me use the httpd config file, instead it wants me to use .htaccess. I am not a server admin but I have to believe that there is a performance hit for using this file? I have a site with approx 5 million page views a month and it's growing. I do not have a lot of rewrite rules just some optimizations we make to serving pages faster ,mod_deflate, caching, etc.

Assuming there is a performance hit, my question is, how bad will it be on my site? Can .htaccess handle 5 million page views with some rewrite rules? How would I be able to test this if I wanted to?

Thanks.

frio80
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4 Answers4

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Yes, it does matter. qouting from http://wiki.apache.org/httpd/Htaccess:

The use of .htaccess files is discouraged as they can have a detrimental effect on server performance. Only use them when necessary.

Nasser Al-Wohaibi
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9

With my test (based on: http://www.fubra.com/blog/2008/01/07/htaccess-vs-httpdconf/), the result is: the performance difference is negligible.

5000 rounds:

# htaccess Disabled
real    1m1.069s
user    0m10.956s
sys     0m9.748s

# htaccess Enabled
real    1m1.658s
user    0m11.434s
sys     0m9.848s
Eduardo Cuomo
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4

Performance hit for reading the file? That's micro-optimization. Favour .htaccess. You don't need special privileges to edit it.

Also on a shared hosting site, everyone shares the httpd.conf settings so, if thats your situation, it's not applicable.

cletus
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    No, it's a dedicated server and my site is the only one on it. After reading Apache optimization techniques, they all point to using httpd instead of htaccess but don't really provide stats to back it up. – frio80 Jun 09 '09 at 13:23
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    if it's a dedicated server why can't you edit your httpd.conf that would really annoy me. Maybe you could get a import into the httpd.conf. – albertjan Jun 09 '09 at 13:25
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Well, to my knowledge, the performance difference is negilible, comparred to the computing time used for whatever's used in the .htaccess. For what's it's worth, I've seen no measurable difference by having a .htaccess file.

mikl
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  • Of couse, you'd have to set AllowOverrid to None to be able to see the difference. – innaM Jun 09 '09 at 13:32
  • How big a difference? When does that "difference" start to matter? – frio80 Jun 09 '09 at 14:11
  • Well, small enough that I haven't been able to measure the difference. That might not fly in a science paper, but I really don't think there's any performance gain here to speak of. – mikl Jun 09 '09 at 15:57