Moving the log files of Apache vhost causes weird browser behavior (or doesn't create logs at all)

Today I tried to change the ErrorLog and CustomLog for one of my apache vhosts from /var/log/apache2/ to /tmp/ (using yast as usual). However after restarting apache the log files are not created in /tmp/. In case you wonder why I am doing this: this is a testing site, I don’t need logs to survive reboot and I want to be able to ‘tail -f’ them without logging as root while working on the site.

Then I tried to set the log directory to some other folder in: /home/username/log

This time the logs were created but when opening the website related to that vhost something very weird happens: the browser keeps refreshing the opened page without any user action every few seconds (and that is seen in the access log too). Tried different browsers - same thing. Setting back the logs to be in /var/log/apache2/ restored things to normal.

What is the reason for this strange behavior and why am I unable to set logs to be in /tmp/?