how big can it be?

practical size of htaccess

[soapystar]

In reality is there any general opinion on how big an htacess can be before it impacts noticeably on the time it takes to serve a page? As i use my htacess to fight referrer spam the file is growing larger than i would like. I have yet to notice an impact but i wondered if anyone else got to a point where it was a noticeable impact.

[Span]

The largest one I have is about 70K and pages are still loading very fast.

When I first started using .htaccesses and knew almost nothing about them I had one in every folder for DirectoryIndex. So there where about sixty on that site. A few months later I discovered I could set those directory indexes in the root .htaccess. So I deleted them all except the one in the root. That made a difference of at least two seconds for every pageload.

[soapystar]

ok..70k is kind of a giant compared to mine...

thanks for that.