Q:

Size of a request header field exceeds server limit due to many If-None-Match values

Here's an interesting case of a client getting the a "400 Bad Request" error and seemingly unable to view a drupal home page hosted on Ubuntu 12.04.3 LTS using Apache/2.2.22:

Bad Request
  Your browser sent a request that this server could not understand.
  Size of a request header field exceeds server limit.

Packet sniffing output:
...
T 2013/09/02 15:23:10.458167 ###.###.###.###:40027 -> ###.###.###.###:80 [A]
GET / HTTP/1.0.
If-None-Match: "1363160742-0", "1363165573-1", "1363175854-1", "1363175854-0", "1363179616-0", "1363181811-0", "1363239319-1", "1363255903-0", "1363259282-0", "1363263398-1", "1363274564-0", "1363329642-0", "1363332613-1", "1363333851-0", "1363599826-0", "1363678909-0", "1363684227-1", "1363699732-0", "1363755181-0", "1363765691-1", "1363767178-0", "1363780208-0", "1363787589-0", "1363795259-1", "1363852409-1", "1363863225-1", "1363928115-0", "1363951793-0", "1363951793-1", "1364133610-1", "1364187608-1", "1364187608-0", "1364203083-0", "1364208174-0", "1364214930-0", "1364219815-0", "1364274441-1", "1364280930-0", "1364280930-1", "1364286055-1", "1364298840-0", "1364298840-1", "1364360674-0", "1364364356-1", "1364381508-0", "1364385520-1", "1364460734-0", "1364882595-1", "1364903271-0", "1364967946-0", "1364967946-1", "1364981713-0", "1364985142-1", "1364992835-1", "1365061578-0", "1365065290-1", "1365076128-0", "1365141088-1", "1365167701-0", "1365171024-0", "1365402404-1", "1365402404-0", "1365411731-1", "1365416882-0", "1365476715-0", "1365487578-0", "1365488880-1", "1365503922-1", "1365514224-1", "1365579101-0", "1365580320-0", "1365582817-0", "1365584926-0", "1365589524-0", "1365608307-0", "1365649987-0", "1365682295-0", "1365685083-0", "1365770532-1", "1365770532-0", "1365844566-0", "1365996619-1", "1366093719-1", "1366093719-0", "1366115408-0", "1366180275-1", "1366186431-0", "1366196476-0", "13662669
...

At this stage I am not 100% sure whether it is just limited to a specific client but the error was reported by a user with the following user agent string:
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_7_5) AppleWebKit/534.57.7 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1.7 Safari/534.57.7

Now the question remains what to do, is it a server issue or just a misbehaving client?

A:

You've found the problem. Some user agents and some requests just get too big for web server defaults. It seems like a silly problem to run into but it keeps happening to me in nginx. Usually when there are silly cookie names and uploads going on... Anyway...
The solution is to just bump the request limit. You can do this globally or just for your site with the LimitRequestFieldSize directive:
LimitRequestFieldSize 32768

That's a 32KB (up from the default of 8KB) limit.

