/favicon.ico 404 Error Running into Authentication Issue #134
Description
Describe the bug
Looking through the logs, it appears that, at times, an unauthenticated user's web browser will make a [GET] request for /favicon.ico. Since we do not currently have one, a 404 error page is generated. However, since the user is unauthenticated, we are unable to validate their identity via the getAuth() call which results in an error being dumped to the logs. The application is able to recover from this state, however it is padding the logs when this could be avoided.
One way to resolve this would be to add a favicon to the application so that it does not generate a 404 error. This would be a fairly minor change, however it would likely not address the underlying issue of unauthenticated users requesting resources that don't exist.
An alternative solution would be to modify the 404 handler (and likely other handlers too) to attempt to authenticate the user, and if it was unable, to then handle the request without authentication. This solution would not reduce the number of 404 error messages that are in the logs, but would reduce the number of stack traces from these error handlers.
Ideally, a combination of both of these solutions would be used to completely eliminate this issue.
I also have a suspicion that this issue is what is causing the sporadic H13 error that Heroku is reporting, though I have not confirmed this.