It's clear that the Internal Dummy Connection requests are needed and it is my understanding that these exist in 2.0 but however are not logged. My concern is not with them existing or logging, but with the request that is being made. The "GET /" request used causes dynamic pages to generate- in some cases with tens or hundreds of requests in a matter of a few seconds. A dynamic page I have shows these Internal dummy connections making tens of database queries to generate and returning 100-200KB of data to the dummy connection. This should be changed to either: a) request something else other than "GET /", such as using "OPTIONS *", or "GET /robots.txt" or "GET /apache_internal_dummy_file.txt" that would not be used or would not incur the massive processing of many of today's Web sites. -OR- (better yet) b) be handled specially by the request handler that in the case of a connection from the local IP with that user agent, it should avoid as much advanced processing as possible(rewrite rules, PHP scripts, Perl scripts, SSI, Directory restrictions, htaccess processing, etc), and simply return a very short "ACK" style request with only the necessary headers to be deemed valid. When the whole server approaches the request limit near the same time or receives certain commands that dispatch these, it is important that it is not making requests it shouldn't. Advertisers and users depend on these database requests to count pageviews and other measures that Apache suddenly adds hundreds of throughout a day... which can add up and show a difference in pageviews from what actually is occuring.
My TEMPORARY solution was to create these virtualhosts (apparently it's an IP6 request in my configuration, so I needed the second). <Virtualhost 127.0.0.1> ServerName localhost DocumentRoot /var/www </VirtualHost> <Virtualhost [::1]> ServerName localhost DocumentRoot /var/www </VirtualHost> At least these I know will return MY dummy file instead of a huge PHP script where the database queries and numbers do matter. However, this issue needs to be addressed if this method is used to wake up the children. Making requests blindly and without care to a Web server can throw off numbers in more than the logs in an era where everything is dynamic. The REQUEST FILE either NEEDS to be configurable, or the HOST NEEDS to be configurable, or the request TYPE needs to be harmless and dealt with internally, or the request needs to be silently handled internally without doing any processing. Either way really, with the preference being internally handling it, then changing the type.
Agreed, as discussed recently on dev@ - committed in: http://svn.apache.org/viewvc?view=rev&revision=517233