Example Clean URL configuration of httpd.conf for performance

This was tested and applies to FC4/php5/Apache 2.0.54.

Enabling .htaccess in Apache requires more work on the part of the server. A full explanation can be found here:
http://www.serverwatch.com/tutorials/article.php/3436911
Suffice it to say that it is in your interest to not use .htaccess files and even disable them if you are concerned about squeezing more performance out of apache.

I moved the rewrite rules (all of the sample .htaccess file really) to /etc/httpd/conf/drupal.conf. Then for each virtual host, one can add the line:

Note that I added %{DOCUMENT_ROOT} and a leading slash in front of index.php -- because I have index.php installed in my document root. If you install it in another directory, you will want to give the relative path to it from document root with the leading slash.

Important: If you forget the leading slash (more specifically, forget to give the relative path with leading slash), Apache will give you a "400 Bad Request" error.

This is better. But we still have a problem where every request will check for the existence of a file and a directory before we apply the rewrite rule. The OS may be able to cache some of that information, but it would still be better to avoid the two file-system checks in the first place.

There are some directories that we should not rewrite. And there are certain extensions that we should not rewrite. Using this information, we can update the rewrite rule to send everything to index.php that does not fall into this category. The first rule excludes the directories "files", "misc", and "uploads". The second rule excludes the extensions you see. Add more if you have other extensions in your directory that should not get passed to index.php.