[nycbug-talk] Odd behavior on FreeBSD 6.3 box

[Matt Juszczak]

I have a simple webserver/mysql box that usually works fine.  But tonight, 
I was seeing load averages in the 80's and 90's, incredibly high I/O wait, 
and perl in the top of the processlist using 80-90% of CPU.  Seemed to be 
spamassassin related, but I also had a ton of apache processes running.

I'm still looking to see if perhaps a website was being hammered, but in 
the meantime I noticed that I was getting this repeatedly (about once a 
second) in my http-access log:

::1 - - [30/Jan/2009:05:52:23 +0000] "OPTIONS * HTTP/1.0" 200 - "-" 
"Apache/2.2.9 (FreeBSD) mod_ssl/2.2.9 OpenSSL/0.9.7e-p1 DAV/2 PHP/5.2.6 
with Suhosin-Patch mod_perl/2.0.4 Perl/v5.8.8 (internal dummy connection)"


Does anyone know what that is (other than the fact that its a loopback 
dummy connection)?  It seems to have stopped since I restarted postfix and 
apache.

Thanks for any thoughts...

-Matt