Posts Not Appearing on Upstreams

I have (and love) nginx front ends that map users to one of many apache
back
ends.

I had php uploads of 2M working. The files were getting posted and all
was
well. I had a request to increase this to 20M and… it doesn’t work.

I see successful posts on the front end (nginx) and back end (apache)
AND
the php upload folder (/tmp/php_uploads) is touched and updated with the
time of the upload. No uploaded temporary file is created. I can change
the
post/buffer size to/from 2M/20M to make it work/not work. It has to be
something obvious (and yes I’ve checked the back end apache/php to make
sure
there are no post/upload limits).

    location / {
            proxy_set_header Host           $host;
            proxy_set_header X-Real-IP      $remote_addr;
            proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For        $remote_addr;
            proxy_redirect  off;
            proxy_pass      http://$server$request_uri;

            client_max_body_size        8M;
            client_body_buffer_size     8M;

            proxy_buffering         off;

            proxy_connect_timeout   60;
            proxy_send_timeout      300;
            proxy_read_timeout      120;

            proxy_pass_header Expires;
            proxy_pass_header Cache-Control;
            proxy_pass_header Last-Modified;
            proxy_pass_header ETag;
            proxy_pass_header Content-Length;
    }

As soon as the file tips over 2M, it fails - which is highly suspicious
but
I see no defaults that thwart that. Also, a 7MB upload takes about 30s
so
the send timeout isn’t failing.

What am I missing?

TIA!

Tony