Apache internals

Sunday, April 08, 2007 by Dave Winer.

One of the most intriguing comments came from Paul Ding, who suggests that the overhead of htaccess files may be too large a burden to bear and says that one could (clever!) use the file system to do what I was trying to do with the htaccess file. That may be true, but I want to know if Apache really reads and parses the htaccess file for every access. Is it not optimized to store the commands in an internal format and then check the mod date before re-loading and parsing the file? Either way, it doesn't seem to make a difference on my server, whose performance monitor hovers near the baseline even with lots of commands in various htaccess files.