WP htaccess rewrites and “maximum number of internal redirects reached”

I’ve found my hosts (Media Temple, Grid Server) to be generally good, but a bit slow. I’m in the UK, but other US hosts I’ve worked with can seem zippier.

This is with FTP too, but I’ve also noticed quite a few of these errors in my Apache logs:

mod_rewrite: maximum number of internal redirects reached. Assuming configuration error.

They account for 18% of the last year’s errors. I went through this a while ago and gave up quickly – the pages were, eventually, loading, so if this was the cause, I would live with it for now.

Looking into it now, I found this article:

https://www.sitepoint.com/print/mod_rewrite-no-endless-loops/

It points to this type of directive in .htaccess as being the problem:

RewriteRule .* /index.php [L]

That’s very much like WordPress’ standard rewrite for using pretty permalinks. It suggests removing the slash. I’ve tried this and – while I know there are other speed issues with MT – I do seem to get less or no page loads that take 10 secs or so.

Has anyone else has this type of experience, with MT or elsewhere? Any comments on the logic of this modification to .htaccess (I don’t fully understand it myself, it just seems to work).