How many members can htaccess authentication handle?
 

I'm using htacess to control membership access to my site.

Just wondering how many members I can have before there is a performance hit?

think of it this way, how many lines can a file have to seriously effect the server performance? I guess a million or more, then it will take around 0.001 second for a server to look through the list.

probably over 1000 or so :2 cents:

yea my best guess is about the same. I wouldnt use a .htaccess file for authentication for anything over 1000 members.
Not just because of the performance hit but the management of those members becomes a beast.

You can use .htaccess with MySQL rather than storing everything in a flat file.

Answer: Use .htaccess with MySQL database.

.htaccess is just a file the webserver is designed to parse.

If AuthConfig is set to All, or other settings, it merely contains directives on what to do for that subdirectory, and any subdirectories thereof.

Apache checking for .htaccess in every subdirectory of the root before finding this one will cause more inode lookups than most .htaccess flat file password combos could ever hope to, especally with FS caching these days.

Generally, you can handle a few thousand if you actually have to, but adding/removing will become a pain, esp if you're not properly locking the file. Using an SQL DB or a state driven key/value pair (memcache, redis) would behoove you for future growth.

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