I've seen it frequently, and yes, this is how it behaves, e.g.: [1]: http://stackoverflow.com/a/579466/94830 http://stackoverflow.com/a/579466/94830 [2]: http

I've seen it frequently, and yes, this is how it behaves, e.g.: [1]: http://stackoverflow.com/a/579466/94830 http://stackoverflow.com/a/579466/94830 [2]: https://issues.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=42040 https://issues.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=42040 I imagine the rationale was something along the lines of many servers/apps are written to incorrectly return 200 with a descriptive error page rather than 500 or whatever the appropriate status code would be. And at the time ab was first written, pages were a lot more static than they are now, so a different page would be more likely to indicate an incorrect response.