.htaccess - Is there a caching wait?

Been writing some mod_rewrites on a .htaccess file. Just wondering if the file takes any amount of time to load in? Or is it pretty much instantanous as soon as you upload it to the server?

My server is a Linux Serv开发者_运维知识库er on a Shared Hosting Domain.

Thanks in advance. :D

---

The only latency I know of is the fact that Apache looks for every single directory under your web root to see if a .httaccess has been created. This is the reason Apache suggests us to avoid .htaccess in instances where a direct edit of httpd.conf is possible.