PROPFIND Requests Causing severe CPU/Server Load Issues

[davidm]

I am experiencing some strange behavior on my sever currently.
Intermittently there are requests like so littering my log:

132.4.4.39 - - [06/Mar/2009:11:40:41 -0600] "PROPFIND /instmsg/aliases/
person.name HTTP/1.1" 500 60 "-" "

and this seems to cause passenger to go spawn children that take up
enormous amounts of the CPU.
This creates a problem that results in a server load of at one point
today over 11.x. I was wondering if anyone
has experienced this issue or is aware of what can be done to fix this
issue.

Here is a relevant stack trace
https://gist.github.com/75f0d414cc367c3901ff

[Tom Copeland]

You may want to block requests that use the PROPFIND method; you can
do this in Apache using a rewrite rule with a RewriteCond %
{REQUEST_METHOD} and returning an error code or redirecting off to
some static page.

Yours,

Tom

[Hongli Lai]

Could you elaborate on these child processes which take up enormous
amounts of CPU? Are these Apache worker processes or Rails processes?

Do you experience this problem with 2.1.1 as well?

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