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My experience with DWA planner is that it does not perform in place rotations unless it really really needs to (gives a high cost for in-place rotation I'm guessing). If given a certain type of rotation goal, it may sometimes calculate that it is better to reverse and move forward to achieve the rotation goal. You can think of it as behaving similarly to a car. As far as I know, there was no known way to tune DWA planner such that it would optimize on in-place rotations (hopefully someone can answer otherwise). If you require a more specific and deterministic local planner, I would recommend writing your own simple planner unless you are ok with the car-like behaviour of DWA local planner.

Regarding your second question, the local map not clearing has nothing to do with DWA planner. Please have a look at your move_base config and double check the settings for your local costmap. You can check the update_frequency and the publish_frequency parameters. Also make sure your Transforms are setup correctly and that your data source for the costmap (eg: lidar) is outputting data properly.

Hope that helps.