Htaccess maximum size?

[DPA]

Hello all,

The company that develops our website recently contacted and asked me if we could remove a large amount of URL rewrites. I've described a few factors and my main questions below.

Some information:

• One year ago we did a large migration. We went from 27 websites to one main website.
• We have got about 2000 rewrites in the htaccess file. And the file is 208kb.
• A lot of links from our old domains still have incoming traffic which are handled by the rewrite rules mentioned above.

Questions:
The company that develops our website said that the htaccess file is too large and is causing or could be causing us website performance issues. They have asked us to remove URL rewrites.
My question is:
a) How many rewrites is too much? 
b) Is the filesize of the htaccess of any importance or is it just the amount of rewrites in the file?
c) Could we solve any potential server/website performance issues due to a large htaccess file in any other way? Increasing some values like 'post_max_size' or by any other solutions handled serverside?

I do not have a lot of knowledge of htaccess rules but I've seen websites that handled over a million of rewrite rules. This is why I'm having doubts on whether removing URL rewrites is the only solution and possibly not the best solution for us.

Hopefully you can help me any further and with the best way to proceed without losing traffic or causing 404 pages.

Thanks in advance!
Iordache Voicu

[KevinBudzynski]

If you have access to the main server's configuration file, place there. Code in httpd.conf is compiled on server restart where .htaccess is interpreted on every http request. The best way of doing it.