External health checking - OPTIONS returns 405

[Pedro Mata-Mouros Fonseca]

Greetings,

The following is an HAProxy option httpchk check request. It's purpose  
is to check a server's health by means of issuing a very lightweight  
request to it. It does this, by default, using OPTIONS (it's possible  
to configure it to perform any type of request, but OPTIONS is  
aparently the most lightweight).

Nginx unfortunately returns a 405 to this. It's not really a big deal,  
but is there anyway to "force" Nginx to return a 200 with an empty  
payload or as small as possible? Would you still consider this a  
lightweight check to perform every 2 or so seconds, on a few hundred  
reqs/sec website?

127.0.0.1 - - [03/Jul/2009:17:34:21 +0100] "OPTIONS / HTTP/1.0" 405  
166 "-" "-"

Thanks for your time.

Pedro.