If you’re on a shared server you most likely will not be able to edit the Apache config file.
I’m on a VPS. I can edit it.
Then editing the http.conf is the better route.
Note that .htaccess follows the same syntax of httpd.conf but, unlike httpd.conf where changes take effect only on a server restart, .htaccess directives are examined each time the particular directory that .htaccess
is contained within is accessed.
You might want to leave the AllowOverride All though. Just in case you want to do something specific to a directory, like password protect the wp-admin directory.
I only have experience using .htaccess for the pretty permalinks, so I don’t know how it will perform with what you’re wanting to do.
The point is to be able to set AllowOverride to None – this is what creates the performance boost! So apache doesn’t need to go looking for .htaccess files.
Oh I see.
Sorry, I don’t have much experience with http.conf to offer you viable answer. But I believe almost everything you can do with .htaccess you should be able to do with http.conf.
Any performance gain from not using .htaccess will be negligible. You’re much better off tuning MySQL with https://github.com/rackerhacker/MySQLTuner-perl, working with httpd.conf to configure the number of http processes, allocating more memory to WordPress, reducing plugins, etc. Search the forums or http://wordpress.stackexchange.com/ for info on WP performance.
