Hello list,

we are using nginx as proxy/loadbalancer and cache in front of our serverpark consisting of 8 apache/php-servers.
We are serving an average of 200 requests per second.

Performance and flexibility is second to none, however we are facing a problem which we really need to solve:

We are experiencing a bug which should have been fixed in 0.8.14:
> *) Bugfix: an expired cached response might stick in the "UPDATING" state.

Symptoms are: Files way beyond their expire time are still being served, the logs state "UPDATING".
Restarting nginx and therefore triggering the "cache loader" process leads to a cleanup of the stale file.
This workaround however is no option for production since we have cache times of as little as 1 min and we obviously can not restart nginx every minute.

I know there has been some work done in ngx_http_file_cache.c (c->node->updating, etc.) however there still seems to be some race. I would be more than willing to help given some pointers....

Since I have not found anything about this issue somewhere in the web recently and we seem to be the only ones experiencing this, I meanwhile even tend to think it is caused by our configuration (attached).

Any Help much appreciated, since we really want to stick with nginx (our customer does not in the meantime).

Thanks,
Frank

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Config (somewhat shortened and anonymised):
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worker_processes 4;
worker_rlimit_nofile 10240;
working_directory /var/lib/nginx/cores/;
worker_rlimit_core 500M;
error_log /var/log/nginx/error.log warn;
pid /var/run/nginx.pid;
events {
worker_connections 8192;
}
http {
server_tokens off;
include mime.types;
default_type application/octet-stream;
log_format main '$remote_addr - $remote_user [$time_local] "$request" '
'$status $body_bytes_sent "$http_referer" '
'"$http_user_agent" "$http_x_forwarded_for"';
access_log /var/log/nginx/access.log main;
sendfile on;
keepalive_timeout 65;
gzip on;
proxy_cache_path /var/ramdisk/nginx/abc levels=1:2:1
keys_zone=abc:1022m
inactive=60m max_size=5500m;
proxy_cache_valid 200 45m;
proxy_cache_valid 302 301 303 10m;
proxy_cache_valid 404 10m;
proxy_cache_valid any 10m;
proxy_cache_valid 401 1s;
proxy_cache_use_stale updating error timeout invalid_header;
proxy_cache_key $scheme$host$uri$is_args$args;
proxy_temp_path /var/cache/nginx/tmp_nginx;
upstream abc_pool {
server 62.146.96.41 weight=3;
server 62.146.96.44 weight=3;
server 62.146.96.45 weight=3;
server 62.146.96.46 weight=3;
server 62.146.96.47 weight=3;
server 62.146.96.48 weight=1;
server 62.146.96.49 weight=3;
server 62.146.96.53 weight=1;
}
server {
include ports.conf;
server_name abcdefg;
ssi on;
proxy_ignore_client_abort on;
location / {
gzip on;
gzip_types text/css application/x-javascript;
proxy_buffering on;
proxy_buffer_size 8k;
proxy_pass http://abc_pool;
proxy_set_header Host $host;
proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
proxy_cache abc;
proxy_cache_valid 200 30m;
proxy_cache_valid any 0m;
proxy_cache_use_stale error timeout invalid_header updating;
proxy_cache_key $scheme$host$uri$is_args$args;
proxy_hide_header Set-Cookie;
proxy_hide_header Cookie;
if ($args ~ module=) {
rewrite ^(.*)$ /modulerw/$1 last;
}
}
location ~ (^/ajax/|^/community/|^/forum/|^/newsletter/) {
proxy_ignore_client_abort on;
gzip on;
gzip_types text/css application/x-javascript;
proxy_buffering off;
proxy_buffer_size 8k;
proxy_pass http://ip_hash_pool;
proxy_set_header Host $host;
proxy_pass_header Set-Cookie;
proxy_pass_header Cookie;
}
location /css/ {
gzip on;
gzip_types text/css;
expires 3600;
root /home/abc/trunk/public;
}
}

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