Pierre-Alain Joye has an update on one of the PECL packages he maintains, htscanner, on his blog today:

htscanner 0.6.0 has been released. It caches the ini settings instead of looking for htaccess files in the current directory and its parents. The performance impact is yet minimal.

A new ini setting was also added, htscanner.default_ttl, to give the lifetime of the cache. You can get this latest version of htscanner from its PECL homepage.