Server people: htaccess/htpasswd question
 

Is there a limit of entries that either of these files can have?

Someone told me that htaccess got fucked up when it reached 2000 entries. is this so?

Bump for a quick answer.

.htaccess is used to setup rules, and each rule takes up CPU processing power.

There is no limit but you definitely want to keep your rules as small as possible.

I think you're referring to .htpasswd used to store the username/password for a members area. In this case there is also no limit and very little CPU power is necessary to have a large file, 50,000+ entries.

So remember .htaccess rules - keep it small

.htpasswd users - grow it large and pro$per!

Thanks! Yes, I was referring to htpasswd.

You've cleared my doubts. :)

if you will have thousands of entries have your admin setup mod_auth_mysql, its an apache module to store apache users in a MySQL database instead of htpasswd file.

good luck :)

Won't this use even more resources? Also, if I choose to implement this, then I can actually use CAPTCHA's for my member's areas?

Had a site that was getting probably 200k-300k page views a day and had some auto deny stuff putting IPs into the htaccess.. Whenever it got up to around 50k-70kin size, there would be significant slow downs..

People forget that htaccess is loaded/checked for every single hit. Anything that is permanent should be put into the server config file instead so it's only loaded once. Most of my sites don't even have a .htaccess anymore.

try the cgi password script in my siggy..

The .htpasswd file is read for every hit unless of course you're using Strongbox
to properly seperate authentication from authorization, so once you get beyond
several hundred members you probably want to move away from 1999 technology.
You can use a database with mod_auth_mysql, but instead I'd just use Strongbox,
which doesn't have to read the password file for each hit so you can keep using
the file or you can use a database with Strongbox. After about 5,000 members
or so I'd definitely combine Strongbox with a database.