hi. I've a server with ~200 wordpress websites hosted. When Google Favicon bot pays us a visit it searches all the sites indexed on our IP, that means it's requesting ~200 favicons. Most of the sites doesn't have one, so the request is passed to wordpress which has to render a 404 page. This means in a matter of seconds dozens of php processes and mysql connections, which causes a server overload. In the past I mitigated this by limiting the number of mysql connection and it partially works, because the server is not crashing anymore, but when this happens it still gets overloaded and unresponsive for some time. Given that I could either create an empty favicon.ico file for every site add a custom htaccess rule for favicon.ico is there a better way of controlling this issue, which doesn't involve touching websites? Thanks
well you forgot to add an entry to robots.txt to disallow indexing favicon for given sites. But yes, one of the three solutions need to be implemented, not much you could do. Create empty favicon Disallow bot to index favicon Check for request to non existing file && filename equals favicon.ico => returning "blank" 404 which could be implemented on vhost level or htaccess or even in the .php file rendering the 404 page.
