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Just curious.

I've set AllowDotFiles to no.

When I do a truss -p hiawatha_pid and request a page, why does it try to open .hiawatha?

open("/.hiawatha",O_RDONLY,0666) ERR#2 'No such file or directory'
open("/usr/.hiawatha",O_RDONLY,0666) ERR#2 'No such file or directory'
open("/usr/local/.hiawatha",O_RDONLY,0666) ERR#2 'No such file or directory'
open("/usr/local/www/.hiawatha",O_RDONLY,0666) ERR#2 'No such file or directory'
open("/usr/local/www/mysite/.hiawatha",O_RDONLY,0666) ERR#2 'No such file or directory'
open("/usr/local/www/mysite/data/.hiawatha",O_RDONLY,0666) ERR#2 'No such file or directory'
open("/usr/local/www/mysite/data/hello.php",O_NONBLOCK|O_DIRECTORY|O_CLOEXEC,0232662060) ERR#20 'Not a directory'

Hiawatha version: 9.3.1
Operating System: FreeBSD 10

The AllowDotFiles defines whether a client is allowed to request a file starting with a dot or not. Btw, access to a .hiawatha by a client is always denied.

What you have seen is Hiawatha itself scanning for the existing of a .hiawatha file. A .hiawatha file can be used to set configuration options for a specific directory. Hiawatha has of course read that file to see what options are set for that directory.

Oke.

But does this affect performance just like the AllowOverride All / .htaccess on Apache?
Because it tries to open several .hiawatha files?

Is it possible to completely disable .hiawatha support so the system does not check for .hiawatha files?

The checking-for-.hiawatha is not noticable, so don't worry about it. Hiawatha has no option to disable the usage of .hiawatha files.

Not sure.
Apache states that .htaccess should be disabled on production servers where performance is important.

I have a site that has a lot of thumbs and images.
1 Page has about 20 thumbsnail which are located in a directory like:
/usr/local/www/mysite/data/uploads/thumbs

So that means 7x open call for .hiawatha X 20 images = 140 open calls for only 1 page request (and of course for some other files as well).

Imagine there are 20 concurrent users loading that page. I waste 2800 open calls, none of my sites use .hiawatha files.

Can I place a feature request for a option to disable .hiawatha files (not just AllowDotFiles)?

So like the .htaccess equivalent AllowOverride None.

Or am I wrong about this?

Consider it done. The 'IgnoreDotHiawatha' option will be available in 9.4.

Thanks!