<876498.2240.qm@web46309.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> <bd9320b30903201326p133e3045m726b07d9c422fa79@mail.gmail.com> <1237581376.3604.7.camel@portable-evil> <bd9320b30903201348l512a2aa4k70f8da9f0e9c8a6c@mail.gmail.com>

On Fri, 2009-03-20 at 13:48 -0700, mike wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 20, 2009 at 1:36 PM, Cliff Wells <cliff@develix.com> wrote:
> > It does, but the OP only has a single upstream.
>
> Ah.
>
> I wonder, but what if the OP put the same upstream down multiple times
> in an upstream {} block with appropriate retry/timeout settings, like
> so...
>
> max_fails=1 fail_timeout=20s;
>
> Essentially it would be a loop but it would allow to retry the same
> upstream (assuming nginx does not have an internal table that rejects
> or malfunctions if you define the same upstream more than once)

This won't work. The problem is that his backend isn't unresponsive,
it's *down*. That is, the backend socket isn't even open. Timeouts
are for sockets that are "open but unresponsive", not sockets that are
"closed".

In this case Nginx would try each backend and *instantly* go to the next
one until it ran out of backends and then it would throw a 50x error.

Cliff