Apache 2.2: internal dummy connection

After working with some RHEL 5 servers fairly regularly, I noticed a reduction in Apache 2.2 performance when many connections were made to the server. There were messages like these streaming into the access_log as well:

127.0.0.1 - - [21/Aug/2008:12:00:10 -0400] "GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 2269 "-" "Apache/2.2.3 (Red Hat) (internal dummy connection)" 127.0.0.1 - - [21/Aug/2008:12:00:11 -0400] "GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 2269 "-" "Apache/2.2.3 (Red Hat) (internal dummy connection)" 127.0.0.1 - - [21/Aug/2008:12:00:13 -0400] "GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 2269 "-" "Apache/2.2.3 (Red Hat) (internal dummy connection)" 127.0.0.1 - - [21/Aug/2008:12:00:14 -0400] "GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 2269 "-" "Apache/2.2.3 (Red Hat) (internal dummy connection)" 127.0.0.1 - - [21/Aug/2008:12:00:15 -0400] "GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 2269 "-" "Apache/2.2.3 (Red Hat) (internal dummy connection)"

On servers with ipv6 enabled, you might see a line like this one:

::1 - - [21/Aug/2008:12:00:15 -0400] "GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 2269 "-" "Apache/2.2.3 (Red Hat) (internal dummy connection)"

I began to wonder why Apache was making these connections back onto itself and initiating a GET /. Apache’s documentation had the following:

When the Apache HTTP Server manages its child processes, it needs a way to wake up processes that are listening for new connections. To do this, it sends a simple HTTP request back to itself. This request will appear in the access_log file with the remote address set to the loop-back interface (typically 127.0.0.1 or ::1 if IPv6 is configured). If you log the User-Agent string (as in the combined log format), you will see the server signature followed by “(internal dummy connection)” on non-SSL servers. During certain periods you may see up to one such request for each httpd child process.
These requests are perfectly normal and you do not, in general, need to worry about them. They can simply be ignored.

Sure, I could easily ignore the requests, but the requests were increasing the load on my server more than I liked. Apache’s documentation suggested omitting the lines from the logs by adding the following to the Apache configuration:

SetEnvIf Remote_Addr "127\.0\.0\.1" loopback

And then adding env=!loopback to your CustomLog lines ensures that the data won’t show up in your access logs. However, you’ll still end up with Directory index forbidden by Options directive: /var/www/html/ filling up your error_logs. A quick search revealed a handy mod_rewrite rule to get rid of these requests as quickly as possible with the lowest effort required from Apache:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^.*internal\ dummy\ connection.*$ [NC] RewriteRule .* - [F,L]

At this point, the requests to the localhost should receive a 403 immediately. Since you can’t keep Apache from sending all of these requests to itself, the best you can do is respond to them in a manner that requires the lowest possible resources.