In Apache you can put configuration files in each directory: .htaccess files. Every time someone requests a page, however, Apache needs to check for a .htaccess file in that directory, reading and parsing it if it exists. Switching to <Directory> blocks in your main config is much faster, but many places like shared hosting environments can't do that. A solution here might be to add an option to relax Apache's promise of rereading .htaccess files on every request. Instead it could search for them and parse them on startup, and you could either send it a signal to tell it to reload them or it could watch them with