I know that OPTIONS calls are normal, and I have read up on how to exclude them from the logs, but there seems to be an inordinately large number of them, eg. 1525 of the last 10k requests were OPTION calls, many times a flood of them in a single second:
::1 - - [21/Feb/2017:18:22:02 +0000] "OPTIONS * HTTP/1.0" 200 - "-" "Apache/2.4.7 (Ubuntu) OpenSSL/1.0.1f (internal dummy connection)"
::1 - - [21/Feb/2017:18:22:02 +0000] "OPTIONS * HTTP/1.0" 200 - "-" "Apache/2.4.7 (Ubuntu) OpenSSL/1.0.1f (internal dummy connection)"
::1 - - [21/Feb/2017:18:22:02 +0000] "OPTIONS * HTTP/1.0" 200 - "-" "Apache/2.4.7 (Ubuntu) OpenSSL/1.0.1f (internal dummy connection)"
::1 - - [21/Feb/2017:18:22:02 +0000] "OPTIONS * HTTP/1.0" 200 - "-" "Apache/2.4.7 (Ubuntu) OpenSSL/1.0.1f (internal dummy connection)"
::1 - - [21/Feb/2017:18:22:02 +0000] "OPTIONS * HTTP/1.0" 200 - "-" "Apache/2.4.7 (Ubuntu) OpenSSL/1.0.1f (internal dummy connection)"
::1 - - [21/Feb/2017:18:22:02 +0000] "OPTIONS * HTTP/1.0" 200 - "-" "Apache/2.4.7 (Ubuntu) OpenSSL/1.0.1f (internal dummy connection)"
::1 - - [21/Feb/2017:18:22:02 +0000] "OPTIONS * HTTP/1.0" 200 - "-" "Apache/2.4.7 (Ubuntu) OpenSSL/1.0.1f (internal dummy connection)"
::1 - - [21/Feb/2017:18:22:02 +0000] "OPTIONS * HTTP/1.0" 200 - "-" "Apache/2.4.7 (Ubuntu) OpenSSL/1.0.1f (internal dummy connection)"
::1 - - [21/Feb/2017:18:22:02 +0000] "OPTIONS * HTTP/1.0" 200 - "-" "Apache/2.4.7 (Ubuntu) OpenSSL/1.0.1f (internal dummy connection)"
::1 - - [21/Feb/2017:18:22:02 +0000] "OPTIONS * HTTP/1.0" 200 - "-" "Apache/2.4.7 (Ubuntu) OpenSSL/1.0.1f (internal dummy connection)"
::1 - - [21/Feb/2017:18:22:02 +0000] "OPTIONS * HTTP/1.0" 200 - "-" "Apache/2.4.7 (Ubuntu) OpenSSL/1.0.1f (internal dummy connection)"
::1 - - [21/Feb/2017:18:22:02 +0000] "OPTIONS * HTTP/1.0" 200 - "-" "Apache/2.4.7 (Ubuntu) OpenSSL/1.0.1f (internal dummy connection)"
::1 - - [21/Feb/2017:18:22:02 +0000] "OPTIONS * HTTP/1.0" 200 - "-" "Apache/2.4.7 (Ubuntu) OpenSSL/1.0.1f (internal dummy connection)"
::1 - - [21/Feb/2017:18:22:02 +0000] "OPTIONS * HTTP/1.0" 200 - "-" "Apache/2.4.7 (Ubuntu) OpenSSL/1.0.1f (internal dummy connection)"
It's a WPEngine dedicated server, but it's fully managed so I don't have root access. I was just trying to confirm that these were not actually contributing to the performance issues we are experiencing. I attempted to emulate a call using curl, like so:
curl -i -v -X OPTIONS http://www.oursite.com/*
But that gave a 404, which due to the performance issues took 30 seconds to generate. Is there a way to send the identical request that the internal connection is calling, just to make sure it's also not eating up resources?
Question Part 2: I understand that these calls are Apache polling child processes. According to apache.org, in certain configurations these calls used to cause issues, and they said you can redirect them if so:
https://wiki.apache.org/httpd/InternalDummyConnection
In 2.2.6 and earlier, in certain configurations, these requests may hit a heavy-weight dynamic web page and cause unnecessary load on the server. You can avoid this by using mod_rewrite to respond with a redirect when accessed with that specific User-Agent or IP address.
I know this is 2.4.7, but I was considering testing redirecting those just to see if it did improve performance. What would be the impact of doing so, assuming it worked?
