It still has to stat the file every time. And it's worse than you think. A path with four elements like http://example.com/one/two/three/four/thing.php http://e

It still has to stat the file every time. And it's worse than you think. A path with four elements like http://example.com/one/two/three/four/thing.php http://example.com/one/two/three/four/thing.php requires that 5 directories be checked for an .htaccess file. Which means apache has to keep track of if there was .htaccess file in that directory the last time it looked for 5 directories, and for each of those whether the timestamp or the size has changed. I'd have to look at the code to see if it caches information about override files but I don't think it does.