What is "AddType" in .htaccess?

Question

What is the difference those?

AddType x-mapp-php5 .php

AddType application/x-httpd-php .php

AddType x-httpd-php .php

?

The page loading speed significantly decreases when I have AddType application/x-httpd-php .php . Why would that be?

Answer 1

It tells apache what mime-type to return when encountering that extension. See the docs here: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/mod/mod_mime.html#addtype

Mime-types are used for several things in Apache.

1. to tell the browser how to treat the file
2. to tell apache which handler to use

With AddHandler you can bind a handler (like PHP) to a specific mime-type. So using a different mime-type for PHP could result in a different parser being used.

Answer 2

AddType associates a mime type with a given extension.