Apache Internal Dummy Connection

Yesterday I updated our Apache HTTPD to the latest version (2.2.8). Soon after this I noticed that HTTPD's access log was logging some stange requests:

::1 - - [13/Mar/2008:09:05:13 +0200] "OPTIONS * HTTP/1.0" 200 -

And what does the request do?

[asdf@foobar logs]# telnet localhost 5453
Trying 127.0.0.1...
Connected to localhost (127.0.0.1).
Escape character is '^]'.
OPTIONS * HTTP/1.0

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Thu, 13 Mar 2008 07:06:43 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.8 (Unix) PHP/5.2.5
Content-Length: 0
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8

Connection closed by foreign host.

I did a little research on the web and came up with the following links:
http://vdachev.net/blog/2007/02/01/apache-internal-dummy-connection/
http://apache.hpi.uni-potsdam.de/document/4_3Multitasking_server.html

It seems like the request above is called "Internal Dummy Connection", and it's a way for apache to let it's children processes know it's time to die. It's usually nothing you should worry about, but if you see many child processes spawn and die, you may want to configure MinSpareServers and MaxSpareServers directives, and your MaxRequestsPerChild.

If you want to clean up your HTTPD access logs, you can do the following:

SetEnvIf Remote_Addr “::1″ dontlog
CustomLog /foo/bar/access.log combined env=!dontlog