.htaccess Limits - What's your largest?
 

I am putting the finishing touches on a new "join for free" type script. The first version of it will use .htaccess for password protection. How many users can .htaccess handle? After all, it is only a flat text file. I can cook up a mod_auth_mysql version easy enough so apache can authenticate users from a MySQL database, but for most people, that apache mod wouldn't be practical. Anyway, my largest .htpasswd file is about 6000 users long and it seems to work okay. Anyone have any experience with a larger password file?

I don't actually know the answer to this (which is why I never use htaccess authentication), *BUT*, the magic number for most old-school unix flat files is in and around 65535. Performance may degrade before that, however.

65535 lines?

I think it's 65535 kilobytes.. or bytes.. one of the two.

65535 kb file size is the limit :thumbsup

Size isn't the only concern, you also need to consider how often that file will be accessed. If you're reading it 100 times / second, you're going to have trouble long before you would if you were only reading it 1 time / minute.