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anon novice
Asked: 2021-01-25 09:55:16 +0800 CST

Excessive requests to /favicon.ico every few minutes from a single user

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A significant fraction of the requests to my webserver over the last few months are from a single user requesting /favicon.ico:

# tail -n 3 access_log 
XXX - - [24/Jan/2021:17:40:18 +0000] "GET /favicon.ico HTTP/1.1" 200 1845 "-" "WidgetKitExtension/3279 CFNetwork/1209 Darwin/20.2.0" "-"
XXX - - [24/Jan/2021:17:41:22 +0000] "GET /favicon.ico HTTP/1.1" 200 1845 "-" "WidgetKitExtension/3279 CFNetwork/1209 Darwin/20.2.0" "-"
XXX - - [24/Jan/2021:17:41:25 +0000] "GET /favicon.ico HTTP/1.1" 200 1845 "-" "WidgetKitExtension/3279 CFNetwork/1209 Darwin/20.2.0" "-"

(I've censored the IP address.) This is a legitimate user, with occasional human requests (with a different user agent and over http/2) to the site. The most recent human visit was several weeks ago, but the /favicon.ico requests continue unabated, on average four times an hour but often every few minutes or seconds, as seen above. In particular, the favicon.ico requests are not associated with requests to any other resources on the site. I don't know if it's relevant, but the favicon is being served over https (I believe there are no corresponding http requests) and appears to be compressed, as favicon.ico.gz is 1599 bytes.

In searching I've seen a variety of other questions about all sorts of weird favicon.ico request patterns but nothing that explains favicon.ico requests in absence of ordinary web requests.

What could be responsible for these excessive requests? I assume it is some kind of configuration problem by the user agent, but is there some change in server configuration I can do to persuade the user agent to cache the favicon? The server is using nginx. Thanks.

useragent favicon

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Obviously, it's done by a "WidgetKitExtension/3279" , which is a kind of widgetkit installed on the MacOS of the user. Now the main problem is to figure out how to solve your problem:

    • Contact the author of the Widget and ask him to optimize it by increasing the time between the requests
    • Think about a caching service like Redis , that will have the file in memory

    If your website is hosted on Linux - the file should already be cached and then you won't need Redis. Yet, you can try to add "expires" directive .

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