I have been having a problem when any bot, or human for that matter, types in a file location that does not exist.
Instead of returning a 404 error, it creates an internal redirect which eventually stops at 10 (my limit on my server).
If enough of these happen it eats up my memory and crashes my server.
So after being told that it was a plugin or theme causing it, I tried everything. Until the last thing to try was to start with a new server, with Ubuntu Hardy, Apache 2, PHP 5 and MySQL 5, then put in a fresh install of WPMU 2.7.1, and use the default theme, and have no plugins what so ever.
To my dismay...the internal redirect happened again when i searched for something that wasn't there, like...
http://bp-dev.org/wp-cotent/plugins/bp-core/images/mystery-man.jpg
or...
http://www.flokka.com/wp-cotent/plugins/bp-core/images/mystery-man.jpg
(i misspelled "wp-content" and the error came)
I soon realized that it wasn't only my site...I could pretty much get a 500 internal server error by typing in a files that doesn't exist on a wordpress Mu blog set-up. And i'm sure if i clicked it enough times, would be able to bring down someones site by eating up their alloted ram on their server, or at least slowing it down.
try it...
http://(insert your mu site here)/wp-cotent/plugins/bp-core/images/mystery-man.jpg
I noticed that buddypress.org and wordpress.com both return 404 errors, which is what it should be. But, of the 30 plus MU installs that I am in no way affiliated with get the same error, it got me to thinking that it might be something in the standard rewrite rules that is doing this.
Now onto my question...
How do I stop or solve this?
Any help is appreciated.