Hi,

> > include /etc/nginx/conf.d/*.conf;
>
> Do you have only one file there? Note that
> upstream{} blocks are
> all defined in http section, and having two with
> identical names
> are likely to cause confusion.

I have 2 upstreams, one for http and one for https, both have different names

> Does these servers (apache1, apache2, apache3)
> actually resolve
> to distinct ip addresses?
Yes, they do resolve to distinct IP addresses. I used those names to hide the IPs.

>

> nginx marks server as "down" after "max_fails"
> failures in
> "fail_timeout" seconds, and re-enables it again
> after
> "fail_timeout" seconds.
>
> As it takes 60 seconds (default
> proxy_connect_timeout) to detect
> that server is down, and you switch it off only
> for 5 seconds -
> it's somewhat expected that nginx will try to use
> dead server most
> of the time.
>
> Also note that statuses of upstream servers are
> tracked
> independantly by each worker (so with 32 workers
> you are likely to
> see dead server used all the time by different
> workers).
>
> You may tune nginx to behave a bit better by
> setting bigger
> fail_timeout and/or smaller proxy_connect_timeout.
>

Thanks for the info. I will try that and see how it goes.