Hi,

IN answer to my own question I found this..

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Max Fails
According to the default round robin settings, nginx will continue to send data to the virtual private servers, even if the servers are not responding. Max fails can automatically prevent this by rendering unresponsive servers inoperative for a set amount of time. There are two factors associated with the max fails: max_fails and fall_timeout.

Max fails refers to the maximum number of failed attempts to connect to a server should occur before it is considered inactive.

Fall_timeout specifies the length of that the server is considered inoperative. Once the time expires, new attempts to reach the server will start up again. The default timeout value is 10 seconds.
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Is this the beast way? Is there any gotchas/best practices to be aware of?

Thanks
W