使用.htaccess或PHP阻止用户IP？

Question

From a performance only view, which would be the best way to block 30 IP addresses?

A) .htaccess file

or

B) PHP code in the file

Answer 1

If you are administrator of your server, I would use none of those, and would ban the IPs at the firewall level -- this way, nor Apache nor Apache+PHP will have to work.

If you're not admin ; well, .htaccess means only Apache, and no PHP to load/compile/execute ; I'm guessing Apache alone (ie .htaccess ) should require less resources than Apache+PHP.

Another way of seing things is maintenance : if you need to add/delete IPs addresses from that list, what would the easiest way be ?
(In that case, I would generally bet for some PHP code...)

Answer 2

I agree with Pascal's answer. But the PHP code is:

$banned = array('129.168.1.1');
if(in_array($_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'], $banned))
{
    die();
}

And the .htaccess is:

order allow,deny
deny from 192.168.1.1
allow from all

Just for the record.

Answer 3

Hardware

or

Hardware + OS

or

Hardware + OS + Apache

or

Hardware + OS + Apache + PHP

Understanding the stacks should help indicate which will be the fastest.

Answer 4

Why not block them at the hardware level (router, load balancer, firewall, etc)? - If its only a block of 30 and you don't need to update them often.

Answer 5

@MikeB 's answered it perfectly. Nevertheless I use PHP and .htaccess in combination as they are easier to maintain and I'm able to use honeypots to automatically add new IPs. Example:

login.php

if ($login_tries > 3) {
    touch('deny/' . $_SERVER['REMOT_ADDR']);
}

.htaccess

# check if ip has been banned
RewriteCond /usr/www/{YOUR_PATH}/deny/%{REMOTE_ADDR} -f
RewriteRule . - [F]

But the main reason why I use this is to allow accidentally blocked visitors to unblock themself through a captcha .