I see a huge delay (ok, several seconds, but it shouldn't be there) when you hit "Continue" on the first page of the signup process. Through troubleshooting, I discovered there is absolutely no delay if I turn off the .htpasswd plugin. My question is this: Is the delay the actual insert time of the new user into the .htpasswd file or, is there some configuration with amember I am missing that is causing this delay? I'm thinking about switching to mod_auth_mysql to see if it speeds things up but, just wanted to check before I undertake changing my server config.
Yes, the .htpasswd plugin is slow. The mod_auth_mysql plugin would be faster (as long has you have good local or dedicated MySQL server), however, I think that the php_include plugin would probably be the fastest. I would disagree there. PHP has to open the .htpasswd file, add to it, then write it back to disk, and the more users you have, the slower it will become. I would avoid using this plugin - it really is slow whatever your setup. I may be wrong about the mod_auth_mysql plugin - this depends on the speed of your MySQL setup (extra queries). What I am sure about is that the .htpasswd plugin is always slow.
I was avoiding the php_include plugin because it would be nice to be able to host files available for download that required authentication. Configuring mod_auth_mysql has turned out to not be an easy process for me so I'll take a look at that again. Thanks for the advice.