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Note that this is intended and desirable for any server with moderate to high loads. Plus, Nginx can reload its configuration gracefully without dropping connections.

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For the uninformed: The reason .htaccess is not desirable is that the server has to check each directory in the request path for an .htaccess file and read its content.

What's the actual effect of this? Negative filesystem lookups are cached, and I believe they're cached forever on local filesystems (since you know if anyone's writing to the local filesystem), so the overhead is just that of a couple of syscalls. That feels like it's small enough that you really want to benchmark to see if it matters for you.

No effect, on my server, a $5-per-month Digital Ocean droplet. Using the program called Apache Bench (ab) to retrieve a file four directories deep: /a/b/c/d/e.html

With .htaccess files turned off (AllowOverride None), I got 282 requests per second. With .htacess files on (AllowOverride All) I got 286 requests per second (Yes, actually a few more hits per second with .htaccess turned on, but the results swing from test to test by a few percent anyway).

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